STANDARDS 

W.C. BROWNELL 





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STANDARDS 



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STANDARDS 



■• 



BY 



Wf C. BROWNELL 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1917 






l*1 



Copyright, 191 7, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published April, 19 17 



MAY -2 1917 




TO ROBERT BRIDGES 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Measures of Value i 

II. The Public 13 

III. Taste 39 

IV. The Individual 64 

V. The Inner Life 89 

VI. " Modern Art " in 

VII. The Cause of Art and Letters 135 



STANDARDS 



MEASURES OF VALUE 

|~T is perhaps a little difficult pre- 
■*- cisely to define the term "stand- 
ards," but it is happily even more 
superfluous than difficult because every 
one knows what it means. Whereas 
criticism deals with the rational appli- 
cation of principles applicable to the 
matter in hand, and has therefore a 
sufficiently delimited field of its own, 
standards are in different case. They 
belong in the realm of sense rather 
than in that of reason and are felt as 
ideal exemplars for measurement by 
comparison, not deduced as criteria 
of absolute authority. As such they 



STANDARDS 

arise insensibly in the mind which 
automatically sifts its experiences, and 
are not the direct result of reflection. 
In a word, they are the products not 
of philosophy but of culture, and con- 
sequently pertinent constituents of 
every one's intellectual baggage. And 
in the field of art and letters they play 
an especially prominent role because 
art and letters are artificial simplifica- 
tions of material much less synthetized 
and therefore less susceptible of com- 
parative measurement, namely nature 
and human life. The possession of/ 
them is equally essential to artist and 
public. Without standards in com- 
mon it is impossible for artist and 
public to get together, for without 
them the two have no common lan- 
guage. Even low standards shared 
by each have undoubtedly a strong 
cementing force. Any kind of lan- 
guage uttered and savored consti- 



MEASURES OF VALUE 

tutes a bond of solidarity — even the 
variety that Walpole said he used on 
principle because everybody under- 
stood it. A certain standard is there- 
fore logically to be induced from even 
such practice as his — the elementary 
standard of comprehensibility. But 
as the instance of Walpole shows it 
may easily be a low one and, in con- 
sidering art and letters at all events, 
I shall not be expected to apologize 
for using the word standard to denote 
a quality rather than a defect, and 
just as when we speak of "style" we 
mean good style and not bad, to mean 
by standards high standards not low, 
or what is the same thing, exacting 
not indulgent ones. Besides, speak- 
ing practically, nobody not negligible 
is extravagant enough even at the 
present time to profess low ones as 
such; and those that may be con- 
sidered inevitable — since the act of 



STANDARDS 

judging in itself implies standards of 
some kind — are no doubt subcon- 
scious possessions. So that we may 
leave both these out of the account 
without risk of misconception in not- 
ing as one of the really significant 
signs of our revolutionary and transi- 
tional time the wide disappearance of 
standards altogether, the contempt felt 
for them as conventions, the indigna- 
tion aroused by them as fetters, the 
hatred inspired by them as tyranny. 

This spirit of revolt — conceived of 
course as renovation by its votaries 
but still manifestly in the destructive 
stage witnessed by the fierceness of 
its iconoclastic zest, so much greater 
than its constructive concentration — 
is plainly confined to no one people 
and to no one field of activity. It is 
indeed so marked in the field of art 
and letters because it is general and 
because the field of art and letters 



MEASURES OF VALUE 

is less and less a sheltered enclosure 
and more and more open to the winds 
of the world. Everybody is agreed 
about the character of this spirit, 
both those to whom it signifies the 
New Day of a diviner order and those 
who deem it a return to chaos, fatu- 
ously exultant in the efficacy of a 
fresh start. Any consideration of it 
accordingly need lose no time in grop- 
ing in the vague as to its nature. Its 
friends and foes, exponents and cen- 
sors, would probably agree that one 
of its main constituent traits is im- 
patience with established standards of 
all sorts; but what has not perhaps 
been as clearly perceived is the exten- 
sion of this impatience to an inveter- 
ate hostility to standards in them- 
selves — at least, as I have just noted, 
to all explicit and conscious ones. 
Goethe's idea of "culture conquests" 
has lost its value, because the new 

5 



STANDARDS 

spirit involves a break with, not an 
evolution of, the past. In the new 
belles lettres a historical reference 
arouses uneasiness and a mythologi- 
cal allusion irritation because they are 
felt to be not obscure but outworn. 
The heart sinks with ennui at the men- 
tion of Amaryllis in the shade and 
thrills with pleasure in imaging the 
imagist in the bath. The plight of 
the pedant in the face of such prefer- 
ences as prevail arouses pity. His 
entire mental furniture is of a sudden 
outmoded. The coin may be of stand- 
ard weight and fineness, it loses its 
currency if its design is not novel — 
making it, that is to say, fiat and irre- 
deemable in the mart of art, sterling 
only in its grosser capacity. The ob- 
jection is to formulations themselves 
as restrictions on energy. 

The age feels its vitality with a more 
exquisite consciousness than any that 
6 



MEASURES OF VALUE 

has preceded it. It does little else, 
one may say in a large view, than 
in one form or another express, illus- 
trate, or celebrate this consciousness. 
And every one who sympathetically 
"belongs" to it feels himself stanchly 
supported by the consensus of all it 
esteems. Nothing fortifies — and oc- 
cludes, it may be added — like such 
confirmation. The militancy of the 
age therefore finds itself not only in 
possession of a perfectly definite — if 
mainly destructive — credo, but of a 
practically united and enthusiastic 
army. Bunyan would certainly have 
given the banner inscribed "Anarchy" 
to one of his Diabolonian captains. 
But who now reads Bunyan — any 
more than Bolingbroke — or has ever 
read him ? All the "modernist" needs 
to do if challenged is to follow the 
example of Max Muller, who replied 
to an opponent seeking to confute 
7 



STANDARDS 

him by citing St. Paul: "Oh! Paulus; 
I do not agree with Paulus." 

Why is it that the present age differs 
so radically from its predecessors in 
its attitude to its ancestry ? Why its 
sudden break with, its drastic depar- 
ture from, its own traditions, its light- 
hearted and adventurous abandonment 
of its heritage ? Why does it so cheer- 
ily contemplate complete substitution 
instead of, as has been the programme 
of revolutionaries hitherto, ameliora- 
tion and advance ? To compare great 
things with small, Christianity assim- 
ilated the antique world in trans- 
forming it. The Renaissance was man- 
ifestly not a naissance; the Reforma- 
tion as plainly not a fresh formation. 
The Revolution was retrospective as 
well as inventive and, enriching its 
imagination with culture, justified its 
most energetic phases by the appeal 
to reason rather than to pure energy 
8 



MEASURES OF VALUE 

— which indeed it regulated radically 
enough. The present ochlocratic ex- 
pansion, modified only by concentra- 
tion upon securing expansion for others 
and contemptuous of results achieved 
even to this end by any former experi- 
ence, is so striking because it is in no 
wise a phase of traceable evolution 
but is so marked a variation from 
type. 

The cause is to be found, no doubt, 
in the immense extension in our time 
of what may be called the intellectual 
and aesthetic electorate, in which, ow- 
ing to education either imperfect or 
highly specialized, genuine culture has 
become less general; with the result 
that the intellect, which has standards, 
\ihas lost co-operative touch with the 
susceptibility and the will, which have 
not, but whose activities are vastly 
more seductive as involving not only 
less tension, but often no tension at all. 
9 



STANDARDS 

* For the instinctive hostility to stand- 
ards proceeds from the tension which 
conformity imposes both on the artist 
who produces and the public which 
appreciates. Hence the objection to 
standards as conventions, and to con- 
ventions as in conflict with the spon- 
taneity which is a corollary of our 
energetic vitality. Conventions they 
certainly are, and the epithet "con- 
ventional" has doubtless earned the 
odium it has realized. But it is a 
mark of naivete to object to conven- 
tions as such. Criticism may properly 
analyze them in examining their title 
to validity in the disputed cases with 
which it is a considerable part of the 
function of criticism to deal. But 
no one has heretofore maintained that 
there are not useful conventions. 
Those of the stage for instance are 
even necessary. Those of ornament, 
even structural ornament, hardly less 
10 



MEASURES OF VALUE 

so. In fact the foundations of the 
edifice in the roomy upper stories of 
which the artist works and the public 
enjoys are based on conventions tested 
by the application of principles by 
criticism and established as sound. 
Conventions that are standards are, 
in a word, not conventions merely. 
And the more securely and uncon- 
sciously both artist and public can 
rest on them without constant verifica- 
tion of their ready-reckoner, as Carlyle 
puts it, the less strain will there be on 
spontaneity of an elevated instead of 
an elementary order and on the appre- 
ciation of its exercise. Any one whose 
spontaneity is unable to find scope 
for its exercise in these upper stories, 
or is unprepared by the requisite pre- 
liminary discipline to cope with the 
competition he finds there, and who in 
consequence undertakes to reconstruct 
the established foundations of the splen- 
ii 



STANDARDS 

did structure of letters and art, will as- 
suredly need all the vitality that even 
a child of the twentieth century is 
likely to possess. 



12 



II 

THE PUBLIC 

THE mutual relation existing be- 
tween artist and public has al- 
ways been obvious to any analysis of 
the origin and development of art, 
whose genesis plainly proceeds from 
the fusion of co-operation and whose 
growth has been governed by demand 
not less than by supply, since however 
the artist may have stimulated de- 
mand he is himself a product. It is 
plain, accordingly, that in the main a 
public gets not only, as has been re- 
marked, the newspapers it deserves, 
but the art and letters it appreciates. 
And since every public at present is 
far more sensitive than ever before 
to the general spirit of the era without 
13 



STANDARDS 

restrictions of time and place, our own 
is as open as any other to the prevail- 
ing cosmopolitan spirit of revolt against 
the accepted and the standard, with 
corresponding results in its letters and 
art. In this field we have always, 
perhaps, been less marked by origina- 
tion than by impressionability, and 
no doubt our reflection of cosmopoli- 
tan influences at the present time is due 
to the same disposition — observable 
indeed now elsewhere than in this 
special field; in, for example, the adop- 
tion of foreign forms of social violence 
without foreign justification, the ten- 
dency of our social sentimentalists, in 
fine, as has been observed, "not to re- 
dress a grievance but to create one. ,, 
The grievance of standards, at all 
events, we have taken very hard, and, 
owing to our ingrained individualism, 
have accentuated what elsewhere has 
been a more unified phase of a general 



THE PUBLIC 

movement by the incoherency of per- 
sonal obstreperousness. This solvent 
has disintegrated the force as well as 
the decorum of our public, and made 
it clear that the agency of which art 
and letters now stand in most urgent 
need is a public with standards to 
which they may appeal and by which 
they may be constrained. 

A detached observer must admit, 
however, that they seem less likely to 
get it than they have been heretofore, 
since the changes that have taken 
place in our own generation have been 
in the direction of enfeebling this 
public by extension and dissipating 
its concentrated influence by diversi- 
fication. Democracy — to which, so 
far as art and letters are concerned, 
any advocate who does not conceive 
it as largely the spread in widest com- 
monalty of aristocratic virtues is a 
traitor — has largely become a self- 

i5 



STANDARDS 

authenticating cult, as antagonistic 
as Kultur to culture, and many of its 
devotees now mainly illustrate aristo- 
cratic vices: arrogance, contemptu- 
ousness, intolerance, obscurantism. 
Terribly little learning is enough to 
incur the damnatory title of "high- 
brow." The connoisseur is deemed 
a dilettante and the dilettante a snob, 
fastidiousness being conceived as neces- 
sarily affectation and not merely evinc- 
ing defective sympathies but actively 
mean. "People desire to popularize 
art," said Manet, "without perceiving 
that art always loses in height what it 
gains in breadth." If Moliere, who 
spoke of his metier as the business of 
making les honnetes gens laugh, had 
only practised on his cook, which he 
is said to have also done, "we should 
perhaps have had," observes M. Andre 
Gide, "more 'Fourberies de Scapin' 
and other 'Monsieur de Pourceaug- 
16 



THE PUBLIC 

nacs/ but I doubt if he would have 
given us 'Le Misanthrope/' And 
M. Gide continues: " These honnetes 
gens, as Moliere called them, equally 
removed from a court that was too 
rigid and a pit that was too free, were 
precisely what Moliere regarded as 
his particular public, and it was to 
this public that he addressed himself. 
The Court of Louis XIV represented 
formalism; the parterre represented 
naturalism; they represented good taste. 
Without the Court this society would 
not, I think, have been possible. And 
it was through this society that the 
admirable French tradition was so 
long maintained." 

A genuine public not unlike this we 
once had and we have it no longer, 
however large our present increment 
of discriminating individuals. Its lim- 
itations were marked but they empha- 
sized its existence. Its standards were 

n 



STANDARDS 

narrow, but it had standards. We had 
a class not numerous but fairly de- 
fined, corresponding to the class Charles 
Sumner found in England, distinct 
from the nobility but possessed in 
abundance of serious knowledge, high 
accomplishment, and refined taste, the 
class, precisely, called by Moliere les 
honnetes gens. We have now a far 
larger public but a promiscuous one, 
in which the elements least sensi- 
tive to letters and art are dispropor- 
tionately large, owing among other 
things to the specialization of the elec- 
tive system with its consequent de- 
struction of common intellectual inter- 
ests and therefore of common standards 
in our higher education; and in which, 
owing to the spread of popular educa- 
tion, all standards are often swamped 
by the caprices of pure appetite and 
the demands of undisciplined desires. 
Rapacity is not fastidious and the kind 
18 



THE PUBLIC 

of art and literature that satisfies its 
pangs shares its quality as well as re- 
sponding quantitatively to its exorbi- 
tant needs. 

The colleges no longer provide the 
community with an educated class in 
the sense in which they used to. They 
are greatly increased in number and 
prodigiously in size, but their gradu- 
ates taken in the mass are furnished 
with a different equipment. There has 
been a marked advance in the various 
branches of learning conveniently to 
be grouped under the head of science, 
and there is undoubtedly much more 
scholarship of any and all kinds in the 
country than ever before. Its con- 
tributions to the literature of all sub- 
jects of study have an undoubted and 
new importance, increasingly recog- 
nized abroad, for example. The tech- 
nical side of the art of writing has been 
effectively studied and popularized so 
*9 



STANDARDS 

that all manner of public questions 
social and political are discussed not 
only competently but effectively by 
writers who as writers have no estab- 
lished position. The text-book liter- 
ature is enormous and the volume of 
collateral reading allied with it corre- 
spondingly large. The vast popula- 
tion teaching and being taught is por- 
tentous. Summer as well as winter 
the round proceeds without intermis- 
sion for both sexes and all ages. Art 
and letters never before received a 
tithe of the general attention now be- 
stowed on them. Every other painter 
has classes, every college its art courses, 
every English Department its semi- 
naries in short-story or play writing. 
Add the output of the common schools 
and the American educational conspec- 
tus becomes almost grotesquely impres- 
sive. The proportion it bears to the 
increase of population, however, is 
20 






THE PUBLIC 

a qualifying consideration, the obvi- 
ously superficial character of much 
of it is another, the encroachment of 
business on the professions in a rising 
ratio with every college class grad- 
uated, a third. Vocational training 
has ravaged the cloisters of the cul- 
tural disciplines. The classics have 
disappeared before the universal pas- 
sion for preparing, as Arnold observed, 
"to fight the battle of life with the 
waiters in foreign hotels." And cer- 
tainly not the least hostile influence 
to the cultural unification of a public 
thus miscellaneously educated is the 
absorption of its most serious elements 
in the various special studies whose 
only common bond is an indifference 
to general culture. If Darwin could 
lose his interest in poetry through de- 
votion to natural science, it can hardly 
be expected that the courses which 
now dominate our curriculums will 
21 



STANDARDS 

fail to have a similar effect, except in so 
far as they are less seriously pursued. 

To expect literary and art standards 
of such a public as this — incontest- 
ably superior as it is I think, in other 
ways, and especially as it appears to 
the eye of hope ! — is visionary. What 
does such a public ask of arts and let- 
ters ? It asks sensation. Hence its 
exorbitant demand for novelty, which 
more surely than anything else satis- 
fies the craving for sensation, and which 
accordingly is so generally accepted 
at its face value. The demand is 
impolitic because the supply is dispro- 
portionately small. An ounce of al- 
cohol will give the world a new aspect, 
but one is supposed to be better with- 
out it if for no other reason because 
a little later two ounces are needed, 
and when the limits of capacity are 
reached the original staleness of things 
appears intensified. Undoubtedly let- 
ters and art suffer at the present time 

22 



THE PUBLIC 

from the effort to satisfy an over- 
stimulated appetite which only extrav- 
agance can appease. The demand 
>i is also unphilosophic because novelty 
is of necessity transitory and the 
moment it ceases to be so it is no 
longer novel. The epithet " differ- 
ent," for example, now so generally 
employed as the last word of lauda- 
tion, we should hasten to make the 
most of while it lasts; some little 
child, like the one in Andersen's story 
of "The Two Cheats," is sure ere- 
long to ask how it is synonymous with 
"preferable." And in losing its char- 
acter novelty inevitably of course loses 
its charm. Nothing is more grotesque 
than last year's fashions. Fashions 
having no standards they appear in 
reminiscence in sharp stereotype, and 
following them seems stark slavery. 
Ceasing to be novel they disclose their 
lack of quality. In fine the passion 
for novelty blinds its victim to the 
23 



STANDARDS 

distinction between intrinsic and ex- 
trinsic, which is all the more impor- 
tant for being elementary. It would 
be idle to deny the sanctions of the ex- 
trinsic, but it is obvious that in this 
case they are altogether subjective. 
If our public would once admit that 
the element of novelty in anything 
has nothing whatever to do with the 
value of the object, it might reflect 
usefully on the value of the mind that 
considers the object, with the result 
of coming to perceive on the one hand 
that all that can be asked of the object 
is to possess intrinsic value, and on 
the other that it is very much its own 
business to justify the value of its 
novel sensations. This may easily be 
below standard, like the pugnacity of 
the chivalrous soul who had only heard 
of the Crucifixion the day before. 

Carlyle, reading the Scriptures while 
presiding at family prayers in the home 
24 



THE PUBLIC 

of an absent friend and, encountering 
the line, "Is there any taste in the 
white of an egg?" exclaiming, to the 
consternation of the household, "Bless 
my soul, I didn't know that was in 
Job!" exhibits a surprise of different 
quality from that of Emerson's small 
boy who, laboriously learning the al- 
phabet and having the letter pointed 
out to him, exclaimed, "The devil, is 
that 'Z'!" It has a richer back- 
ground — a background Carlyle him- 
self needed when, announcing that he 
didn't consider Titian of great impor- 
tance, he earned Thackeray's retort 
that the fact was of small importance 
with regard to Titian but of much with 
regard to Thomas Carlyle. So on 
those occasions, admittedly rare, when 
candor compels crudity to confess to 
culture, "I never thought of that," 
or "What surprises me about Shake- 
speare is his modernness," what cul- 
25 



STANDARDS 

ture feels is the lack of standards im- 
plied in the lack of background dis- 
closed. "How do you manage to 
invent those hats?" inquired a friend 
of the comedian Hyacinthe. "I don't 
invent them," replied the actor, "I 
keep them." 

One need not be learned in its hats 
to value the light a knowledge of the 
past throws on the present. Even to 
despise the conventional intelligently, 
one should know its raison d'etre. 
As a matter of fact the current dis- 
like of it is largely based on igno- 
rance. How violate precedent with 
complete satisfaction without a real 
acquaintance with it ? What wasted 
opportunities for iconoclastic delight, 
what neglected possibilities of destruc- 
tive activity lie behind the veil which 
for the uneducated conceals the stand- 
ardized tradition. If, on the other 
hand, any feebler apostle of the new 
26 



THE PUBLIC 

spirit should balk at the general dis- 
position to revolt for its own sake and 
maintain that mere neglect of prece- 
dent and confining oneself to the posi- 
tive business of personal expression 
without regard to either following or 
defying precedent is the path to true 
originality, how is one to know that he 
is not essentially respecting, or in the 
case of our geniuses repeating, some 
masterpiece of the unvalued past ? In 
such a case those who do know can 
hardly be blamed for taking a different 
kind of interest from his own in his 
self-expression. They may rank his 
performance intelligently, but how can 
he ? His work may be good but his 
philosophy must be false. In strict 
logic therefore only familiarity with 
the standards of achievement can jus- 
tify the radical iconoclast to himself. 
A little general learning has come to 
be a useful thing in a world where 
27 



STANDARDS 

from its infrequency it has ceased to 
be dangerous and where the thirsty 
drink deep but taste not the Pierian 
spring. 

Even subjectively considered the 
charm of novelty has no greater claim 
than that of familiarity. Real value 
in the cause once given — without 
which appreciation of its novelty is 
valueless, since every one must ac- 
knowledge that to admire what is in- 
ferior merely because it is novel would 
lower the most elementary of standards 
— familiarity is as admirable a sen- 
sation as novelty. I think myself it 
is in better taste, but an inclination 
to one or the other is no doubt a mat- 
ter of temperament. Old things of 
value newly felt and newly presented, 
new things of value aptly introduced, 
have their own abundant warrant, 
which it would be stupid to contest. 
St. Paul relied on the Athenians' 
28 



THE PUBLIC 

open-mindedness in this respect to sec- 
ond his zeal for their spiritual welfare, 
and St. Augustine confesses charming- 
ly the charm he felt in the fugitive 
beauties of new aspects of nature. 
Scherer has an admirable passage in 
eulogy of freshness of view and ex- 
pression — in high differentiation, of 
course, which is the whole point. No 
one would deny the repulsiveness of 
the commonplace, the trite, the fusty, 
or the unprofitableness of the stale and 
flat. In fact the clamor for novelty 
has itself already reached the stage at 
which it enters this category. But 
familiarity in what is admirable has 
an equal authentication. The richer 
the mind, the more it delights in asso- 
ciations; the more undisciplined the 
temper, the more it chafes at them as 
at best immaterial. Toujours perdrix 
contains a warning for the intellectual 
palate, but this organ has other sources 
29 



STANDARDS 

of satisfaction than variety; for ex- 
ample, Alonso of Aragon's "Old wood 
to burn, old wine to drink, old friends 
to trust, old authors to read. ,, "What 
novelty," says George Eliot, "is worth 
that sweet monotony where everything 
is known, and loved because it is 
known?" Deprivation of it often 
brings out its real quality with unex- 
pected sharpness. The prodigal son 
no doubt found a solace in the old en- 
vironment which had escaped the notice 
of his elder brother, and perhaps it 
is still greater experience with husks 
that our public chiefly needs to teach 
it the attractiveness of the familiar 
that is established — not causelessly — 
and wean it from the pursuit of the 
untried, the untested, and accordingly 
the problematical. At all events, by 
definition novelty can have no stand- 
ards and consequently the love of it 
though it may characterize cannot 
30 



THE PUBLIC 

constitute a public as distinct from 
the individuals that materially com- 
pose it. And it is so much the most 
prominent as fairly to seem the only 
common characteristic that with re- 
gard to art and letters our public pos- 
sesses. 

^ A sound philosophy, however, is no 
more than general culture, the de- 
sideratum of an emotional age, and 
it is not difficult to trace our deprecia- 
tion of the former to a popular recoil 
from disciplined thought, in itself emo- 
tional, and of the latter to the purely 
emotional extension which our demo- 
cratic tradition has of late so remark- 
ably acquired. One of the results 
has been the wide-spread feeling that 
intellectual standards are undemo- 
cratic, as excluding the greenhorn and 
the ignoramus from sympathies now 
extended to the sinner and the criminal 
— who have assuredly a different title 
3i 



STANDARDS 

to them, belonging at least to a differ- 
ent order of unfortunates. How other- 
wise account for the diffusion of pop- 
ular discussion of literary and art, as 
well as social and political, themes 
among the inexpert, whose interest 
in them is taken as evidence of the 
spread of intelligence, though it is an 
interest which would cease if confronted 
by subjection to intelligent standards? 
The less the science of these themes 
is understood, the more opportunity 
for the voces et prater ea nihil, now so 
audible and often so eloquent in their 
exposition. One of the commonest of 
current phenomena is the emotional 
preoccupation of intelligent but unen- 
riched minds, in instinctive revolt 
against traditional standards, with res 
non judicatce, things yet to be ad- 
judged, reading nothing else, for exam- 
ple — save fiction, of course — and 
showing in consequence less augmen- 
32 



THE PUBLIC 

tation of mental furniture than the 
results of prolonged emotional stimu- 
lation. 

A public of which a large element 
feels in this way is bound to make few 
demands of knowledge in its artists 
and authors — even in its writers of 
fiction ! Accordingly one must admit 
that in the field of fiction — bewilder- 
ingly populous at the present time — 
our later writers, excelling in what- 
ever way they may, nevertheless differ 
most noticeably from their European 
contemporaries in possessing less of 
the knowledge which is power here as 
elsewhere. They are certainly not less 
clever any more than their public is 
less clever than the European public. 
But every one is clever nowadays. 
We are perhaps suffering from a sur- 
feit of cleverness, since being merely 
clever it is impossible to be clever 
enough. Our cleverness is apt to stop 
33 



STANDARDS 

short of imagination and rest content- 
edly in invention, forgetful of Shelley's 
reminder that the Muses were the' 
daughters of Memory. Columbus him- 
self invented nothing, but the chil- 
dren of his discovery have imper- 
fectly shared the ruling passion to 
which they owe their existence. New 
discoveries in life are hardly to be 
expected of those who take its por- 
trayal so lightly as to neglect its exist- 
ing maps and charts. And this is why 
our current fiction seems so experi- 
mental, so speculative, so amateur in 
its portrayal of life, why it seems so 
immature in one word, compared grade 
for grade with that of Europe. The 
contrast is as sensible in a page as in 
a volume in any confrontation of the 
two. 

I know of no English short-story 
writer of her rank who gives me the 
positive delight that Miss Edna Fer- 
34 



THE PUBLIC 

ber does — or did. But why should 
we play all the time ? Why should we 
bracket 0. Henry's immensely clever 
"expanded anecdotes," as Mrs. Ger- 
ould calls them, with the incisive 
cameos carved out of the very sub- 
stance of life taken seriously, however 
limitedly, of a consummate artist like 
Maupassant? Such fixed stars of our 
fiction as Henry James and Mr. How- 
ells are perfectly comparable with their 
European coevals, but I am speak- 
ing of the present day — not of the 
day before yesterday whose horoscope, 
so rapid are our changes, is already 
superseded. And how are we to have 
a standard of culture, of solidity, of 
intellectual seriousness, in fine, as ex- 
acting as that to which a Swiss or a 
Scandinavian novelist is held, a stand- 
ard to which such rather solitary 
writers as Mrs. Wharton in prose and 
Mrs. Dargan in poetry, having the 
35 



STANDARDS 

requisite talent and equipment, in- 
stinctively conform, if our public is 

so given over to the elation of emotion 
as to frown impatiently on any intellec- 
tual standard of severity, or, owing 
to its dread of conventionality, on any 
common standard whatever? An en- 
thusiastic writer, herself a poet, speaks 
ecstatic ally of 44 the unprecedented mag- 
nificence of this modern era, the un- 
precedented emotion of this changing 
world," as if the two were interde- 
pendent, which I dare say they are, 
but also as if mercurial emotion were 
a better thing than constancy, which 
is more doubtful, or as if unprece- 
dented emotion were a good thing in 
itself, whereas it is probably bad for 
the health. Orderly evolution — 
which is at least spared the retesting 
of its exclusions is unsatisfactory 
to the impatient, desirous o( changing 
magnificence. It involves such long 
periods that we can hardly speak of 



THE PUBLIC 

its abruptest phases as unprecedented 
unless they occur as "sports," which 
are indeed immune from the virus of 
precedent. However, it is quite right 
to talk of this changing world, and, 
since it is so changing, difficult to talk 
of it long — except in the language of 
emotion. Otherwise than emotionally 
one is impelled to consider its shiftings 
as related to the standards of what is 
stable, which is just what it objects to. 
Hence the difficulty its apostles and 
its critics have in getting together 
about it. 

To assign to art and letters the 
work of transforming aesthetically the 
representative public of an era like 
this is to set them a task of a diffi- 
culty that would deject Don Quixote 
and dismay Mrs. Partington. There 
remains the alternative of increasing 
the "remnant." Of the undemocratic 
doctrine of the "remnant" in the social 
and political field I have never, myself, 
37 



STANDARDS 

felt either the aptness or the attraction. 
The interests of people in general are 
not those of the remnant, and his- 
tory shows how, unchecked, the rem- 
nant administers them. Except in a 
few fundamentals they are less mat- 
ters of principle than matters of ad- 
justment. And the attractiveness of 
the doctrine must be measured by 
the character of the remnant itself 
— in our case certainly hardly worth 
the sacrifice of the rest of the nation 
to achieve. But the remnant in art 
and letters is another affair altogether. 
It cannot be too largely increased at 
whatever sacrifices; and the only way 
in which it can be increased is by the 
spread of its standards. Otherwise 
art and letters will be deprived of the 
public which is their stimulus and 
their support and be reduced to that 
which subjects them to the satisfac- 
tion of standardless caprice. 

38 



Ill 

TASTE 

A HETEROGENEOUS public at 
■* ^ one chiefly in its passion for nov- 
elty may easily have the vitality it 
vaunts, but there is one quality which 
ineluctably it must forego: name- 
ly, taste. I hasten to acknowledge 
that it reconciles itself with readiness 
to this deprivation and depreciates 
taste with the sincerity inseparable 
from the instinct for self-preservation. 
Certainly there are ideals of more 
importance, and if the sacrifice of 
taste were needed for their success 
it would be possible to deplore its 
loss too deeply. We may be sure, 
however, that the alternative is fun- 
damentally fanciful. The remark once 

39 



STANDARDS 

made o( an American dilettante of 
distinction that he had convictions in 
matters of taste, and tastes in matters 
of conviction, implies, it is true, an 
exceptional rather than a normal atti- 
tude. But though it is quite needless 
to confound the two categories, it is 
still quite possible to extend consider- 
ably the conventional confines o( taste 
without serious encroachment on the 
domain o( convictions. Nothing is in 
better taste than piety, for example. 
And since also nothing is more funda- 
mental, any one in search of an explana- 
tion o( our present wide-spread antip- 
athy to taste as outworn and unvital 
might do worse than scrutinize the 
various psychological changes that have 
accompanied the much-talked-of de- 
cline o\\ at least formal, religion and 
the transformation, at any rate, of the 
spirit of conformity to carefully and 
not capriciously constructed credos. 
40 



TASTE 

Taste indeed is essentially a matter 
of tradition. No one originates his 
own. Of the many instances in which 
mankind is wiser than any man it is 
one of the chief. It implies conform- 
ity to standards already crystallized 
from formulae already worked out. 
In the famous preface of his "Crom- 
well" Victor Hugo asserted, to be sure, 
that an admirable work might be com- 
posed of all that the arid breath of 
gens de gout from Scudery to La Harpe 
had dried up in its germ. But he re- 
ferred to the pedantries of professional 
classic criticism rather than to the 
fastidiousness of a sensitive public. 
The preface long ago became itself 
the classic statement of the case for 
romanticism and established stand- 
ards of its own. All that it contains is 
no doubt useful to remember, though 
it is rather sentimental than profitable 
speculation to dwell on the mute and 
41 



STANDARDS 

inglorious <>l country churchyards, and 
one may excusably take .1 more cheer- 
ful view of the consequences resulting 
from the interposition ol the chevciux 
(It- jrisr of pme conventions, even, 
between the otherwise unprotected 
public and the crowd of candidates for 
lis favoi . 

()[ Hugo himself Rcnan, .1 better 
judge in this particular, observed that 
"he had not time to possess taste." 

He offered compensations for the de- 
ficiency, it must be acknowledged, but 
to the very considerable number of 
writers who can hardly hope to equal 
him in this respect the cultivation ol 
taste may none the less be commended. 
They ^>\\^ more easily afford the re- 
quired time. Rcnan even, compact 
of taste as he was, lost touch with it 
occasionally in the " Abbcsse de 
Jouarre," for instance, and perhaps 

also in meriting Doudan's remark: 

r 



TASTE 

"I know of no theologian with ;i more 
intimate knowledge oi Oriental flora." 
And taste h;is the great advantage of 
being cultivable. There is nothing 
recondite about it. It is a quality 
particularly proper to the public as 

distiiK t IVoin the ;u t ist . Indeed its 
possession hy the public provides the 

;utist with precisely the constraint he 

most needs and is mo St apt to forget 

espe( i;illy in tlie day of so-called 
"free art." It cannot be acquired of 
course without cooperation; and it 

involves the effort needed to acquire 

and is not fostered by the emotion that 

is an end in itself. At the present 

time, accordingly, its pursuit is at- 
tended with the discomfort inherent 

in the invidious. It is parti< ulaily 
ironical to pass one's life, as doubt- 

le is still done now and then, in 
regretting that one knows so little 

and at the same lime arouse disgUSl 
43 



STANDARDS 

for knowing so much. The remnant, 
if extended, will have to be of martyr 
stuff but it need fear no compunctions 
if it is tempted into occasional reprisal, 

consoled by Rivarol's reflection: "No 

one thinks of how much pain any 
man of taste has had to suffer before 
he gives any." 

Our own public has always been a 
little exceptionally sensitive about the 
limitations of taste, even in days when 
it more generally possessed it. But 
currently we merely exaggerate a neg- 
lect of it that is wide-spread. One 
thinks, of course, of France. It is 
not to be denied that in France the 
democratic spirit with its associated 
anarchy has invaded the composure 
of the taste which, in the aesthetic 
held, more than any other element 
constitutes French superiority. Our 
own extravagances and incoherences 
in this definite field are apt to be re- 
44 



TASTE 
flections of similar French phenomena. 

Talis itself, still the finest eivie spec- 
tacle ever secured by the co-operation 
of natural growth and express design, 

shows in spots and details an atten- 
uation of decorum and conformity 

shows the corrosion of the spirit of 

"free art." In France, however, aes- 
thetic standards ate unlikely to be 
permanently deposed by fanaticism 
or forgotten l>y obtuseness. They are 
constantly recalled to the sense by the 
models thai embody them, and con- 
stantly recur to the reflection of minds 

insensibly more or less moulded by the 
tradition they define. Moreover the 

principles that underlie them are con- 
stantly reuttered by voices less noisy 

than penetrating but thoroughly na- 
tional in sounding the overtones of 
Culture however ''advanced" the air, 

and in exhibiting an aristocratic qual- 
ity even in chanting the most popn- 



STANDARDS 

hi i paean. There is, besides, running 
through the currents and eddies of the 
moment, which boil rather than flow, 
a clear stream of temperamentally 
conservative criticism, that clarifies 
and purifies and carries along to the 
ocean of general appreciation the sweet- 
ness without the sediment of the trou- 
bled waters through which it passes, 
while at the same time it tranquilly 
transports its own freight of principles 
and standards. 

In other words, in France the cur- 
rent era has its esprits delicate as well 
as its fanatics. And they are of their 
era and not merely in it. With us 
perhaps criticism which accepts stand- 
ards is less sensitively, less sympathet- 
ically, discriminating in its treatment 
of whatever flouts or forgets them. 
Mr. Mather, in his indulgence for the 
poetcs maud its, for the abnormal, for 
what he calls "disorderly geniuses ,, 
46 



TASTE 

;uhI "unbalanced talents" (sec his 
illuminating chapter on the egregious 
Greco), is distinctly exceptional. Our 
conservatives are, in general, quite 
flat-footed. They resemble rather 

Professor Conrad Wright who in his 

"History of French Literature" ex- 

hilaratingly, I think announces him- 
self a convinced classicist, or even Mr. 

Cox who in his suggestive and ahove 
all timely hook has been thought to 

confound the classic spirit with the 
academic. Lei him not he disquieted. 
Mr. Dougherty tells me that Matisse 
is fundamentally academic. On the 

other hand (lat-footed is a faint epithet 
with which to characterize our "ad- 
vanced" critics, who wring all withers 
when they are making the academic 
jade wince. 

In contrast take M. Andre ( iide. 
He is particularly open-minded, though 
he has plenty of temperamental pre- 
47 



STANDARDS 

dilections, and is quite in accord with 
the present revolt against the romantic 
without being in the least a neo-classi- 
cist. His "modernity " in a word is 
unimpeachable by all save the par- 
tisans to whom modernity and Vesprit 
dilicai are by hypothesis antithetical. 
From these however his implicit sub- 
scription to standards in his professed 
exclusive devotion to the principle 
of taste does definitely distinguish 
him, and for the purpose of showing 
this T condense a few felicitous sen- 
tences from m\c of his conferences: 

"Beauty is seemed only by an arti- 
ficial constraint. Art is always the 
result of constraint. To believe that 
the freer it is the higher it rises is to 
believe that what keeps the kite from 
mounting is the string. Art aspires 
to freedom only in morbid periods. 
It loves to burst its bonds. There- 
fore it chooses elose ones. . . . The 
48 



TASTE 

great aitist is he to whom the obstacle 
serves as ;i spring-board." 

And referring to the "art foi art" 

;irt of the day he speaks of it as "in- 
solently isolating itself" and "fatu- 
ously despising what it is too ignorant 

to evaluate"; of the artist as one who 
without external control is fatally 
driven to "seek only his own appro- 
bation"; and of the critic, his con- 
gener, as "judjdn^ works in the name 
of his personal taste and the greater 
or less pleasure they jnve him," 
which he manifestly considers a severe 
indictment. But irresponsibility is an 
old story in criticism. Its invasion 
of the far wider field of art in general 
is otherwise significant. It is no more 
needful than possible or even desir- 
able that every one should be a com- 
petent critic of art and letters. As 
well ask that every reader should be ;i 
writer or every writer a writer of criti- 



STANDARDS 

i ism. But it is desirable that every 
one who counts at all, every render of 
real books and every one seriously 
interested in plastic art should have 
Standards of taste and possess them 
so thoroughly as to apply them in- 
stinctively and rigorously. Otherwise 
there is no logical escape from the 
prospect that the wider the appetite 
lor hooks and art becomes the more 

superficial will be its appreciation and 
the more worthless will be the pro- 
duction that appeals to it directly 
and intimately reflects its easy and 
ordinary reactions. 

It is a mistake to suppose that self- 
expression without self-control and en- 
joyment without standards of value are 
consonant with the effort that is a 
prerequisite to real achievement in 
either accomplishment or appreciation. 
Undisciplined self-expression riots in 
the absence of general taste, and the 
So 



TASTE 

less exaction the writei experiences in 

the reader, the less effort he expends 
in rewarding or even securing his atten- 
tion. The less demanded hy the he- 
holder of the picture, the Statue, the 

building, the quicker the artist's sag 

into inertia. Ineptitude may easily 

he quite as genuine ;is significance, 
and if genuineness is the only demand 

public taste makes of the artist, if he 
is required to meet no standards or — 
what at this Stage of the world's prog- 
ress is the same thing to neglect 
all models, the quality of his supply 

is hound to deteriorate in accordance 

with as fatal a law as that which makes 
water run down-hill. 

What most opposes, however, the 
advancement of this salutary element 
of exacting taste in our public is the 
vigor of the spirit of non-conformity, 
which hy definition has no standards, 
and which is no longer the affair of 
5' 



STANDARDS 

temperament it used to be but is a 
conscious ideal. As such of course, in 
an emotional era, pursued with pas- 
sion, it is also pursued into details of 
high differentiation — : manners, tastes, 
preferences, fastidious predilections. 
To the new theology, the new sincerity, 
the new poetry and painting, the new 
everything in fact will ultimately no 
doubt be added the new refinement, 
the new decorum. Meantime our non- 
conformists are concentrated upon vili- 
pending the old. This is a field in 
which the new egotism may assert 
itself with the minimum of effort 
involved in mere talk — talk that as- 
serts an independence of conventions 
marked by positive fanaticism. Gib- 
bon notes with his accustomed per- 
spicacity the affinity of independence 
for fanaticism, in remarking the hos- 
tility of fanaticism to superstition — 
the bugbear of the present time. " The 
52 



TASTE 

independent spirit of fanaticism/' he 
says in his chapter on Mahomet, 
"looks down with contempt on the 
ministers and slaves of superstition," 
and the remark explains the current 
Islamic invasion of the reticences of 
life. Given her undeniably fanatical 
independence, for example, it is easy 
to see why the contemporary young 
girl of the thoughtful variety is so 
shocked by the constitution of society 
as it is, as to vary her impassioned 
sympathy for the street-walker by 
grinding her teeth at the thought of 
the Sunday-school. But is it not a 
rather literal logic that leads her to 
involve the purely decorative elements 
with the structure of the civilization 
that has produced her? Why, for 
instance, should she be "thrilled" by 
reading, why should she herself write, 
that not inconsiderable part of the 
detail of the latest fiction that is else 
S3 



STANDARDS 

/ 
t 

too colorless to have any other mo- 
tive than the purely protestant one of 
heartening the robust by revolting the 
refined? The motive is as obvious in 
trivia] as in grave examples, since both 
may be equally gross so far as taste is 
concerned. Observe this picture in a 
recent clever novel — by a lady — 
that has evoked a very general chorus 
of cordial appreciation. Two young 
men, one an Oxonian, occupy con- 
jointly a room in a foreign seaside 
hotel: 

"'I got out of bed,' said Hewet 
vaguely, * merely to talk, I suppose.' 

"'Meanwhile T shall undress,' said 
Hirst. When naked of all but his 
shirt and bent over the basin, Mr. 
Hirst no longer impressed one with 
the majesty of his intellect, but with 
the pathos of his young yet ugly 
body. 

"'Women interest me,' said Hewet. 
54 



TASTE 

"'They're so stupid/ said Hirst. 
'You're sitting on my pyjamas.' 

"'I suppose they are stupid/ Hewet 
wondered. 

"'There can't be two opinions about 
that, I imagine/ said Hirst, hopping 
briskly across the room, 'unless you're 
in love — that fat woman Warring- 
ton ?' he inquired. 

"'Not one fat woman — all fat wo- 
men/ Hewet sighed. 

"'The women I saw to-night were 
not fat,' said Hirst, who was taking 
advantage of Hewet's company to 
cut his toe-nails." 

A moment later: 

"'I wonder if this is what they call 
an ingrowing toe-nail ?' said Hirst, 
examining the big toe on his left 
foot." 

Another brief interval. 

"Hewet contemplated the angular 
young man who was neatly brushing 

55 



STANDARDS 



the liins of his loe-nails inio the fire- 
place in silence foi •> moment . 

" ' 1 respect \ on, I lust,' lie re- 
marked*" 

Is there anything in "Tom Jones" 
that strikes quite that note? Hie pic- 
ture is manifestly less .1 gem ol gttifi 
than .i defiance oi decorum, and .is 
such perhaps "stimulates" those who 
would find a dialogue between Achilles 
and Pat roclus insipid. Thewritei and 
the sympathetic readei occupy an 
attitude which foi them, of course, 
illustrates the new sincerity but foi 
others constitutes the spectacle oi a 
pose, preoccupied n\ it li producing an 
elVcct while unconscious ol what it 
exemplifies. Obviously its sincerity, 
though flaunted, is not Fundamentally 

ncwei than t lie fall of man, and is 

but a variant oi the desire to, as the 

French say, rpatrr Ir bourgeois* The 

nrw sincerity pctsents more drastic 

56 



IA.7I E 



though not, I chink, more disintegrat- 
ing phenomena. But one muff draw 

the line somewhere ;t r m I it is decorous 
to draw it on the hither side of the 
purlieus ol pornography, whiffl of 
whose un-Ai ahian l)reCZCI no one can 
have escaped and wIiiiImj accordingly 

in any consideration oi twentieth-cen- 
tury fiction ji would, though easy, be 
profitless, because superfluous, to pro- 

( red. I [crC at \c;\A one may pay t he 

tribute oi a wistful regret to those 
days, dist ant in all respe< ts but that 
of t ime, in whii h it i ould be said of 

even the dilettante who had only 
tastes in mat ters of < onvil t ion that 

he had in any i ase ( onvi< t ions in 
matters ol taste* 

\)\< , ,\ affords a more agreeable field 
of reflet l ion and has the advantage 
foi out purpose of illustrating the 
same phenomenon of impatience with 
standards oi decorum. Here we can 

S7 



STANDARDS 

sec how superficial it is to denounce 
the insufficiency of old standards for 
the new duties taught by new occa- 
sions, and perceive how much more 

consistent it is to demand the aboli- 
tion o( standards altogether, In a 
word, how fashions differ from stand- 
aids, and how exacting is the tyranny 
which replaces the slavery o( conven- 
tion with the despotism o( whim. 
The aspect of "this changing world" 

presented by its habiliments is in- 
deed such as to arouse il unprecedented 
emotion." Already, to be sure, there 
are signs o( even more change, but 
since it is manifestly to be progressive 
instead o( purely haphazard we know 
whither we are drifting and that the 
need for purely emotional apprecia- 
tion will remain stable. The current 
affinity of the bottom of the skirt 
for that o( the decolletage is destined 
no doubt to a richer realization, owing 
58 



TASTE 

to what we arc now calling an "in- 
tensive " conviction of the truth that 
"the body is more than raiment." 
And as we are to he, above all things, 
natural and as, except for artists, 
the female form is the loveliest thing 
in nature, we not only have the pros- 
pect of still further emotional felicity 
in the immediate future, but may 
look forward with the gentle altruism 
of resignation to the increase of man- 
kind's stock of happiness in a remoter 
hereafter — in the spirit of the French 
seer, who, on the eve of the Revolu- 
tion, exclaimed: " Les jeunes gens sont 
bien heureux ; Us verront de belles 
choses." We know how Madame 
Tallien justified him. 

Undress, too, as well as dress, holds 
out an alluring prospect, at least in 
fiction, in which the imagination is 
already very considerably " stimu- 
lated " by what the eye is condemned 

59 



STANDARDS 



to forego in fact, No community 
has, of course, as yet adopted the 
Virgilian motto half-heartedly sug- 
gested by Hawthorne for Brook Farm: 
Y . stfi duSj but fiction 

may be said to front that way, Mi. 
Galsworthy is only the most dis- 
tinguished ot those who enable their 
readers to emulate Action at their 
ease, and we are constantly assisting 
at the bath of beauty in company 
with lady novelists to whom the ex- 
perience must naturally seem less sen- 
sational, but who are especially sensi- 
tive to the desirability o( being "in 
the swim," if not reckless o( becoming 
what Shelley calls "naked to laughtei " 
in the process. 
Nor will our successors be confined 

to the delights oi the eve. The world 
oi sensation is acquiring among us, in 
various ways, a new extension, as our 
fiction, again, amply shows. The par- 
60 



TASTE 

ticular sense of smell, for example, is 
being rescued from neglect and re- 
ceiving a recognition long withheld 
by puritan fastidiousness. Its inspira- 
tion proceeds less from Keats's ex- 
ample or Max Beerbohm's advocacy, 
perhaps, than from Maupassant, whom 
our later fictionists wisely study, I 
believe, without always studying wise- 
ly, and of whom Henry James re- 
marks that " human life in his pages 
appears for the most part as a con- 
cert of odors," owing to a sense of 
smell "as acute as that of those ani- 
mals of the field and forest whose 
subsistence and security depend upon 
it/ 1 The heroine of an essentially 
charming recent novel has "a mo- 
ment" that "was forever connected 
in her mind with the smell of delicate 
food and fading flowers and human 
beings well washed and groomed which 
floated out to her from the dining- 
6i 



STANDARDS 

room." Every one knows the per- 
sistent associations of odors, and the 
house-party was a large one. Be- 
sides people wasli much more than 
they used to and their aura deserves 
more attention. 1 lowever the neg- 
ligent are not neglected. The young 
lady, whose father is a socialist, has 
already had an experience of a differ- 
ent sort — the odor of a showy hotel 
court in which "everything in sight 
exhaled an intense consciousness of 
high cost . . . suggesting to a sensi- 
tive nose another smell, obscured but 
rancidly perceptible the unwashed 
smell Boating up from the paupers' 
cellars which support Aladdin's pal- 
aces of luxury." Taste may surely 
be too rigid and in any case its limits 
include those temperamental prefer- 
ences which, like colors, are prover- 
bially exempt from disputation. No 
doubt there is more gain than loss in 
62 



TASTE 

enlisting a new sense in the service of 
literature. But it would be fatuity 
to expect it to conserve its freshness 
long. Odors evaporate. This kind of 
spontaneity is especially in danger of 
prompt conventionalization like any 
new perfume — its raison d'etre being 
too obscure to be kept vividly in mind 
and the sensuous satisfaction it affords 
tending rapidly to lose its edge in be- 
coming staple. And there would be 
much more prospect of its serving 
the ends of taste in general if what is 
staple were also standard. 



63 



IV 
THE INDIVIDUAL 

THE staple is often however Far 
From being standard* Nearly 
two generations ago Arnold cited Re- 
nan as saying: "All ages have li.nl 
their inferioi literature l>ui the great 
danger of our time is that this in- 
ferior literature tends more and more 
to get the upper place. 91 Applied to 
OUl own time the remark would lose 
none of its justice, It would need 
indeed a sharpei edge in view of one 
partieular phase which not only the 
literary movement but the whole in- 
tellectual flux has assumed sinee Re- 
nan's day and which with all his 
pessimist ie distrust of democracy Ke- 
nan himsell eould not have foreseen 
in its aeuteness. This phase is marked 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

not merely l>y the numei u al pre- 
ponderance ol mediocrity, which alone 
he and kindred .pun- deplored al- 
most ( ) avcnly as il seemed ;it the 
time hut by mediocrity invigorated 

by the current aimless yet abounding 

vitality, wln'( h gives it a force medi- 
ocrity heretofore has never even con- 
ceived of itself as possessing. Ours 

is the day of the majority but there is 

QOthing invidious in ascribing medi- 
ocrity to the majority in the intellec- 
tual sphere. One may ;h knowledge 
it with the same wry frankness with 

which Thackeray discoursed <>f snob,. 
As Henley, who certainly did not suffer 
from morbid self-disparagement, ohm; 
wrote mei "We are all too damnably 
second-rate/' What is new is the ex- 
traordinary self-respect that medioc- 
rity has suddenly a( quired. 

It is no doubt as an unc on g< ions 
corollary of the quickened sense of the 
6s 



STANDARDS 

dignity of the individual as such — 
something which can hardly perhaps be 
too much insisted on in the social and 
political field — that in the intellec- 
tual field also the individual as such 
is felt to have his rights. The new 
humanity should add a chapter about 
it, to bring its gospel up to date. De- 
mocracy is to my sense the finest thing 
in the secular world, but in a cosmic 
universe there is a place for everything 
and it should keep its place. For it is 
not after all the more obvious charac- 
teristics of our public considered as a 
whole — its heterogeneousness, its in- 
stinctive preference of the novel to 
the standardized and its restive recal- 
citrancy to the restrictions of taste — 
that give the cause of art and letters 
at the present time an especial claim 
on our attention. Considered in the 
mass a mercurial public may con- 
spicuously fail in its duty to this 
66 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

cause, but being mercurial it is sus- 
ceptible of transformation. The char- 
acter of the individuals composing it 
is the more fundamental considera- 
tion. And this is something that is 
forced on our attention more fre- 
quently and more forcibly than the 
general traits which it requires more 
effort to synthetize. 

The modern individual is, to begin 
with, under some misconception as 
to his own nature which he has some- 
how come to conceive as that of a 
highly organized personality. Reflec- 
tion would assure him however that 
mere individuality is a matter of the 
will, personality of the character. 
One can be propagated by mere 
fission; the other cannot even be 
inherited. One synthetizes individual 
traits; the other divides without dis- 
tinguishing one individual from an- 
other — sheep, for example. Unlike 
67 



STANDARDS 

individualism which is a doctrine, per- 
sonality cannot be preached; legiti- 
mately there is no such word as "per- 
sonalism." In a work of art, it has 
been observed, personality is not what 
you put in but what you can't keep 
out. One opposes the standardiza- 
tion which the other eludes. Though 
the impression made by each must 
be measured by standards of value, 
they differ constitutionally as the in- 
dependent spirit differs from the in- 
tuitive. Thus personality not only 
need lose none of its character but 
may even intensify its force in the 
conformity that independence feels as 
a fetter. Raphael's personality is as 
accentuated as Blake's, Torquemada's 
energy as great as Luther's. Indi- 
vidualism as such is shut off from 
following ideals that are not less at- 
tractive for having attracted others. 
Personality is surely the most inter- 
68 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

esting, the ultimate element of any 
form of expression. It begins where 
the others leave off. To prescribe 
it, however, is absurd, since to define 
it is impossible. In character it is 
an abstraction equally applicable to 
all personalities and concretely as un- 
characterizable as its phenomena are 
apparent; imponderable as a perfume, 
impalpable as a presence. On the 
other hand its extreme attenuation or 
even its complete absence is quite 
as conspicuous in many individuals 
whose claims to its possession are 
aggressively asserted. I have labored 
the point because it is in virtue of 
his assumed personality — always an 
exceptional possession — that the mod- 
ern individual — who is not excep- 
tional at all — asserts his title to a 
special sanction for his activities in 
either production or appreciation. 
Naturally independence is his cen- 
69 



STANDARDS 

tral ideal, which incidentally accounts 
for the disintegration of the public he 
composes. He deems it his duty to 
live his own life, to do his own think- 
ing-unaware of the handicap lie 
involuntarily assumes in doing so. 
When Arnold observed that "man wor- 
ships best in common; he philosophizes 
best alone/' what he had in mind was 
that it is best to do one's thinking in 
solitude — solitude rather than inde- 
pendence. Thinking for oneself meant 
to him that neglect of the thinking of 
others which produces less the thinker 
than the thinkist — to adopt a useful 
distinction; a result that his prescrip- 
tion of culture, which he defined as 
the knowledge of others' thinking, was 
particularly designed to prevent. The 
subject in fact suggested to him the 
anecdote of Mrs. Shelley exclaiming to 
a friend who advised her to send her 
son to a school where he would be 
70 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

taught to think for himself: "Oh, my 
God ! send him where they will teach 
him to think like other people." One 
can understand that Mrs. Shelley 
should speak feelingly. As to wor- 
ship we have to a very considerable 
extent replaced the communion of the 
saints, of which Arnold was undoubt- 
edly thinking, by a division of the 
community into two distinct and in- 
terhostile sects of secular schismatics, 
one adoring the golden calf and the 
other incensing the under dog. Natu- 
rally for standards that unite we have 
shibboleths that divide. But when 
we come to philosophizing around and 
across this central line of cleavage the 
independence of our thinking is fatal 
to conformity in far greater detail. 
We fairly whirl in centrifugal discus- 
sion which contemplates agreement as 
little as it achieves it. The evil of 
repressing free thought is felt at once, 
7i 



STANDARDS 

but the blessings of encouraging it 
are largely reserved for Bacon's "next 
ages," owing to its deliquescence in 
free speech. The spirit of the forum 
has invaded the household, where, 
however, even forensic standards cower 
before the eminently unparliamentary 
contentiousness concentrated around 
the hearth. 

All this is of course marked by vi- 
tality but it is permitted to hope that 
uncrystallized by standards it may not 
prove viable. It may yet crumble in 
dissatisfaction under some sudden il- 
lumination of our prevailing self-ador- 
ing introspection. Arnold himself em- 
ployed a short and easy formula of 
consolation when depressed by the 
way the world was going. "The in- 
stinct for self-preservation in human- 
ity" would, he thought, ultimately 
reorient it. Unhappily some of the 
effects of Emerson's law of compen- 
72 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

sation are to be counted on only by- 
deferred hope and in the longest of 
long runs. The forces of disintegra- 
tion, in which individual independence 
is disguised only from itself by the 
cloak of socialist theory, have an in- 
definite future before them if they 
consolidate by still greater numbers 
the conquests their numbers have al- 
ready made in virtue not of their 
quality but of their numerousness. 

The proverbial egotism of the young, 
to whom no doubt the world's progress 
is chiefly due, is perhaps a source of 
strength to them in their work of 
amelioration and advance. Modesty 
is doubt, says Balzac, and egotism 
gives them the requisite confidence 
in a world largely given over to the 
grosso modo in its struggles upward. 
But the most sympathetic observer of 
their attitude and activities at the 
present time must note a fundamental 
73 



STANDARDS 

change in this advantageous quality 
— a transformation of force into 
ferocity modified by fatuousness. The 
old feel the effects of this in many 
pathetic ways inevitable in the sup- 
planting of general standards by ego- 
tistic ideals. It is a common experi- 
ence that the domestic affections 
suffer from it. The Gospel conflict 
of the daughter-in-law against her 
mother-in-law is a customary and 
chronic affair compared with the cur- 
rent cleavage between entire genera- 
tions — in its completeness an alto- 
gether new thing, I think, under the 
sun. The domestic conflict is no doubt 
a derivative of our highly individualist 
predatory socialism, whose admirable 
sentimental humanity is rationally so 
markedly modified by the natural 
man's very natural desire for a share 
in the plutocrat's "swag," and whose 
disintegrating disposition to substi- 

74 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

tute the individual for the family as 
the social unit follows the injunction 
to be off with the old love before being 
on with the new so enthusiastically 
as to kick it down-stairs before even 
dissembling its love. This seems less 
prudent but more logical than are 
our belligerent pacifists, its congeners, 
who are for having men fall into the 
arms — and apparently the ammuni- 
tion — of their brothers abroad while 
continuing to dynamite their enemies 
at home. But in sacrificing to the 
individual, one the family and the 
other the nation, both illustrate the 
same egotistic tendency. 

The fireside conflict is noticeably 
embittered by the failure of youth to 
consider how much more crowded the 
pigeonholes of age are than its own, 
and how much more irksome it is, 
accordingly, to rearrange their con- 
tents; and by the failure of age to 

75 



STANDARDS 

bear in mind that principle of pleas- 
ing which renders it necessary, as 
Scherer observes, to learn many things 
that one knows from those who are 
ignorant of them. The old will yield, 
victims of a feebler egotism, encum- 
bered with standards prohibiting self- 
regardant ideals, less concerned about 
living their own lives and preserving 
their sacrosanct individualities than 
haunted by dread of losing the love 
of their loved ones, and even in their 
benefactions sceptical about any real 
presence in the s^tone of "free verse" 
and "free art" proffered now so prod- 
igally to those asking for bread. 
./Esthetic activity as an alleviation 
of the ills of the proletariat they find 
a baffling conce^ti®n. And they in- 
stinctively shy at the "free living" 
of which they have never experienced 
the delights and have only observed 
the disadvantages. They must also 
76 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

very generally be hamstrung by com- 
punction, reflecting whose fault it all 
largely is. The mother whose child 
a visitor noticed hacking the furniture 
and who replied with composure to 
the latter' s concern about it that the 
child was "merely expressing herself/' 
merely herself illustrated a rather gen- 
eral practice during the formative years 
of contemporary youth — owing per- 
haps to a parental partiality for Boeo- 
tian precedents, including that of sow- 
ing serpent's teeth. Similarly with 
what may be called the secondary social 
education received by the present gen- 
eration, and even with titular educa- 
tion itself, as I have already intimated, 
with its supplanting of standards of 
culture by ideals that further the 
withering of the world, as heretofore 
comprehended, and the exaltation more 
and more of the individual, as. now 
apotheosized. • 

77 



STANDARDS 

Any friction springing from this 
assertion of individual independence 
is, however, lightly excused to the 
conscience of those to whom it is due 
by what is called, and immensely 
prized as — since moral considerations 
are inescapable — the "new sincerity." 
Yet the new sincerity can be no 
advance on the old unless it is merely 
meant that there is more of it. Even 
so, in the realm of the intelligence 
sincerity is but an elementary vir- 
tue. It is often the hardest thing to 
forgive, as when, for example, it is 
vaunted as a superior substitute for 
intelligence itself. The common asser- 
tion of respect for another's convic- 
tions on account of their sincerity 
in spite of disagreement with them is 
but an instance of confused thinking. 
You respect the person for this rea- 
son, not his convictions. If he is a 
person whose mental machinery in 
78 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

general is qualified for the construc- 
tion of good ones, you respect them 
because in virtue of that fact they 
may be sound. The convictions of 
such a person may even affect your 
own. The case occasionally occurs, 
no doubt, though rare in these days 
of controversial acrimony unfavorable 
to deference in any discussion. But 
sincerity has nothing to do with it. 
The most that can be said for sin- 
cerity here is that a person who is 
sincere with himself is apt, other 
things being equal, to have superior 
light. Sincerity with oneself however 
is not what is meant and doubtless 
is as infrequent in the new sincerity, 
which is rather violent and emotional, 
as in the old — which also, being less 
conscious, is less constrained, more a 
habit than an attitude and less open 
to self-deception through self-interest 
in holding the pose. 
79 



STANDARDS 

In any case pluming oneself on the 
outspokenness which spares no sen- 
sibilities is only a way of turning 
offensiveness into a virtue by focussing 
one's attention on oneself and is but 
one more detail of the seriousness 
with which the modern individ- 
ual contemplates his individuality. 
"There have been heroes, ,, says Tho- 
reau, "for whom this world seemed 
expressly prepared," and beside whose 
"pure primeval natures" "the dis- 
tinctions of morality, of right and 
wrong, sense and nonsense, are petty 
and have lost their significance." 
Even in the days of transcendentalism 
these heroes were probably background 
figures in the tapestry of time. Now 
they are all around us. Sitting of old 
on the heights they have stepped down 
with Freedom herself through town 
and field, though far less scornful than 
their august associate of the false- 
80 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

hood of extremes: The individual of 
course conceives genius to be far com- 
moner than heretofore in consequence 
of the removal of old shackles, and he 
discovers it on every hand. He is 
saved from the fatuity of claiming 
it for himself — where he is so saved 
— by asserting all the same his rights 
to its privileges. But his vital urge 
is so insistent, his belief in self-expres- 
sion so profound, as to make it not 
unnatural for him to suspect in him- 
self heroic potentialities. The Whit- 
man-like warmth of expansion he 
feels for his fellows, glorifying them 
so generously in the mass as to 
see them individually aureoled in 
the common effulgence, must in self- 
defense increase his self-respect. If 
there is the democracy of Pericles 
there is also that of Cleon and the 
pyschology of the latter is not ob- 
scure. 

81 



STANDARDS 

The individual character of our vari- 
ety of socialism, loosely and untechni- 
cally so-called, keeps it within senti- 
mental limits and confines it to an 
altruism which differs from what used 
to be known merely as unselfishness 
mainly in the greater freedom from 
self-discipline and the wider field for 
self-expansion in energies consecrated 
by benevolence but comforted by self- 
esteem. And it is easy to see how 
our latter-day luxuriance of poets and 
artists and novelists has flowered out 
of the new and broader conception of 
the dignity of the individual, which 
eliminates the sense of responsibility 
imposed by subscription to standards 
born of an interest in the welfare of 
organic mankind. Such a sentiment 
as that of Aurora Leigh, who it may 
still be remembered had devoted a 
good deal of reflection to art and life 
and to philanthropy as well: 
82 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

"Better far 
Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means, 
Than a sublime art frivolously " 



has now almost as quaint a sound as 
the even older observation, 

"But wealth is crime enough to him that's 
poor.' , 

So far as benevolence is concerned, 
however, it must be acknowledged 
that self-esteem was never more abun- 
dantly justified. Probably there never 
was a time in which there was so much 
warrant for a wide-spread secular feel- 
ing comparable to that which the young 
man of great possessions would have 
enjoyed had he taken the counsel 
he sought. To deny the need of new 
standards for new phenomena would 
indeed exemplify a smugness exagger- 
atedly Victorian — to employ the stig- 
ma so lavishly affixed to their own nest 
83 



STANDARDS 

by the Stymphalidae of the day. And 
the most conspicuous advance that 
can be chronicled is the penetration 
by the democratic spirit of society 
in general so as appreciably to have 
increased the sympathy between classes 
and stations in life. Secular society 
has certainly organized its benevo- 
lences on a larger scale and to better 
effect than ever before. Hawthorne 
was incorrigible and no doubt, had 
he written in the present era, would 
still have found a "Blithedale Ro- 
mance" to write. But he could not 
now have written "The good of others, 
like our own happiness, is not to be 
attained by direct effort but inci- 
dentally/' without considerably quali- 
fying this comfortable half-truth in 
view of the multifarious benevolent 
agencies now everywhere successfully 
at work. The great changes since his 
day in material conditions, and the es- 
84 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

tablishment of practically permanent 
inequalities, have naturally evoked such 
agencies, and made strictly contrac- 
tual ethics — first formulated by the 
first murderer — seem inadequate save 
to pharisaism, power and its parasites. 
But as regards the individual the 
psychology of "service" is still un- 
settled. The ideal has largely sup- 
planted that of mere duty — hitherto 
proverbially "the law of human life." 
"Service" as often illustrated is too 
compact of energy and emotion to 
submit to the discipline now felt to 
be so devitalizing, but heretofore a 
prime factor in the development of 
character of standard weight and fine- 
ness. Its consciousness has awarded 
it indulgences that have pushed all 
notion of penance into the background. 
Du sollst entbehren expresses an idea 
rarely heard of now save as necessarily 
involved in the pursuit of some prac- 
85 



STANDARDS 

tical utility. The popular literature 
of philanthropy is fiercely polemic. 
Its claims for others are not obscurely 
associated with the conviction that its 
own have an equal warrant. The main- 
tenance of rights — less justified by 
the human consciousness than duties, 
and only logically deducible as rights 
from the duties toward us of others — 
often appears as the assertion of such 
claims. Moreover the reverse of the 
medal is apt to monopolize the atten- 
tion and the emotion of our host of 
amateur humanitarians, who "thrill" 
far more readily in response to the 
idea of wrongs than to that of their 
constructive righting. As a recent poet 
sings: 

"It is a joy to curse a wrong." 

Indignation is the most self-indulgent 

of the passions — at least of those 

which may also be virtues. It re- 

86 



THE INDIVIDUAL 

quires no tension. The gentlest souls 
sag into its luxurious embrace by mere 
relaxation, though remaining too long 
they undoubtedly discover it to be 
one of those things of which one may 
have too much and suffer accordingly 
— as do their friends. Nothing in 
fact is more characteristic of the com- 
plicated psychology of service pur- 
sued with enthusiasm than a certain 
savagery, subtly intensified By the 
self-righteousness that lies in wait for 
any altruism that is absorbing. And 
we may say that the philanthropic 
movement itself has become popular- 
ized, as it could hardly have been other- 
wise, by the affinity of a certain side 
of it for a particularly alluring form 
of original sin. Naturally our fiction 
reflects it as it does the other ego- 
tistic phenomena of our individualist 
independence. Accordingly, owing to 
its preoccupation with the superficial- 

87 



STANDARDS 

ities of self-expression and of efferent 
energies so exclusively, we have had 
in recent years very little of it dealing 
with the inner life. 



88 



V 

THE INNER LIFE 

A DELIGHTFUL character in a 
recent delightful story thus un- 
packs her elderly heart about the youth 
of the day: 

" Bless me, they all seem to me very 
worthy and very clever. They talk 
a great deal about humanity and what 
is good or bad for it, but the drawback 
is that they aren't human themselves. 
Besides they have no sense of what is 
congruous. They belittle big ques- 
tions by discussing them in season 
and out of season. Now no surround- 
ings are incongruous to one's thoughts. 
One can think of anything anywhere, 
but you can't talk of anything any- 
where; at least you can't if you have 
any sense — I'm not sure whether to 
89 



STANDARDS 

say of decorum or of humor. . . . The 
present generation all seem to me to 
have the lust of speech. No sooner do 
they think a little thought than they 
are in a desperate hurry to proclaim 
it far and wide. If no one hears it 
they feel it is wasted. They don't 
seem to take into account the immense 
importance of the thoughts that are 
not spoken, and consequently there is 
no background to what they do say." 
The disappearance of the inner life 
could not be more cogently chronicled. 
The practice here implied of putting 
the stock instead of the samples into 
the show-window dissipates the per- 
fume of personality inseparable from 
the radiation of the inner life — just 
as in art it sacrifices the suggestive- 
ness that is of such signal interest to 
all minds but those devoid of associa- 
tion, blank of memory, and bereft of 
imagination. And just as, according 
90 



THE INNER LIFE 

to Stevenson, one of the conquests of 
romanticism over the classic stark- 
ness, the change from Fielding to 
Scott, as he noted, was the conscious- 
ness of the background, so the develop- 
ment of the personality in richness, 
in solidity, in seriousness, in every- 
thing worth while, in a word, depends 
upon the background in which self- 
respect supports the more salient self- 
activities, the background secured by 
reticence and reserve and secured by 
them alone. Reserve is as important 
to a character of any force as reserves 
to an army. The " little thoughts" 
of real thinkers are otherwise consider- 
able than those Mrs. Pimblett had in 
mind precisely because they have back- 
ing. What characterizes the trans- 
formation of romanticism in its turn 
into naturalism a outrance is in fact 
consciousness of the foreground. Life 
is brought into a single plane and that 
91 



STANDARDS 

plane too close for an agreeable per- 
spective. And consciousness of the 
foreground necessarily obtrudes con- 
sciousness itself — always something 
to be dissembled in the interest of 
both life and art. Carlyle's insistence 
that it ought to be suppressed alto- 
gether is, I think, an extreme view. 
But intensified into self-consciousness 
it is surely a foreign element that 
should be kept out of the picture. It 
is also sand in the artist's machinery. 
And there is enough of it at present 
in life as well as in art to be awkwardly 
apparent, and involve much discom- 
fort to the spectator. 

Our lack of personal reserve is in- 
deed in not only the self-conscious 
but the polemic stage, and even more 
aggressive than awkward. The cur- 
rent ideal of being both naked and 
unashamed has no precedent later 
than that of the Garden of Eden, 
92 



THE INNER LIFE 

when, too, the basis of serenity in 
these circumstances was physical inno- 
cence rather than moral insensibility. 
An itching for publicity is no doubt an 
integral trait of the unregenerate na- 
ture, but in its present development 
besides illustrating a propensity un- 
leashed it appears as a positive prop- 
aganda, vaunting the superior claims 
of its gospel and delighting in the 
dismay of dissenters. The only obli- 
gation attached to "living one's own 
life " is apparently that of living it in 
public. This is particularly one of 
the by-products of the feminist move- 
ment which has done so much for those 
who need it and so little for those who 
do not. " Men serve women kneeling," 
says Thackeray; "when they get on 
their feet they go away." More go 
away, it is said, than formerly; per- 
haps because less needed they feel 
less wanted. One of the most success- 
93 



STANDARDS 

ful lives I have known is that of a 
modern Cornelia, whose jewels, quite 
openly, consider it rather a failure 
because it has no literary, art, public 
uplift, or other forensic laurels to crown 
it. This stage is no doubt a transi- 
tory one and one need not linger over 
the kind of taste it betrays. The next 
may see sufficient sense winnowed by 
the threshing of old sillinesses of arti- 
ficial reserves and overnice reticences 
to constitute a new composure that 
will be an advance on the old. Mean- 
time one mainly notes that these 
reformations, proceeding by reaction, 
proceed slowly, and that the present 
crisis of suspension of standards 
through the mere enthusiasm of en- 
ergy would be advantageously short- 
ened by an even greater development 
of self-consciousness — to the point, 
namely, where one perceives the figure 
he is cutting while engaged in savoring 

94 



THE INNER LIFE 

the satisfaction he achieves. In which 
case our fiction, for example, would 
display less of what even the public 
ward of the maternity hospital screens, 
and would be freer from those intimate 
ineptitudes that are only paraded in 
letters because they are curtained in 
life. 

The life of the senses, it is true, has 
had at times the advantage over pure- 
ly routine existence of having a pos- 
itive ideal of its own and therefore its 
own standards. In the antique world 
it developed a philosophy of extreme 
refinement. No social trait of pre- 
Revolutionary France is more familiar 
than that absence of grossness through 
which vice lost half its evil. Our own 
recent awakening to this life has been 
enthusiastic, and is still characterized 
by the protestant and reforming spirit, 
eclectic rather than evolutionary and 
inclined to imitate practices that 
95 



STANDARDS 

contradict rather than modify the 
standards it now abjures. So that with 
the best disposition in the world we 
are still in the awkward age in our 
pursuit of the Epicurean ideal. The 
first thing the hero of " Locksley Hall/' 
it will be remembered, proposed to 
do after he had "burst all links of 
habit" was not to rise on stepping- 
stones of his dead self to higher things, 
but to wed some savage woman and 
to procreate an inferior race. Being 
the heir of all the ages, however, he 
soon perceived that his dreams were 
wild — or, as we say now in our pro- 
gressive dialect, "it can't be done" — 
and even came to count the gray bar- 
barian lower than the Christian child. 
In a time when the heritage of the 
ages is regarded as a handicap and the 
barbarian though gray ranks higher 
than even the child if a Christian, we 
are inevitably thrown back on the 
96 



THE INNER LIFE 

natural man, whose propensities may 
be described as stable though stand- 
ardless. What he is likely to do with 
them can be gathered from what hap- 
pens anywhere when — in our graphic 
modern phrase again — the lid is taken 
off the social caldron. It can also be 
inferred from current social sentiment 
of one sort or another, such as the 
instinctive preference for the criminal 
to the police, which sees a Jean Val- 
jean in every thief, and an implacable 
Javert in every constable and which, 
if not yet thoroughly popular, is def- 
initely professed by the more thor- 
oughgoing exponents of the new free- 
dom — not to speak of irregularities 
with which, as I have suggested, the 
individual man sometimes recoups him- 
self for the "service" he is so ardently 
eager to render to mankind. 

For all to whom it is a novelty, in 
fact, the life of the senses has its dis- 
97 



STANDARDS 

advantages. The first requisite for 
leading it is, of course, independence 
— the independence which is the first 
thing that the inner life recognizes 
as out of reach on any terms it is 
willing to accord. But independence 
is not the only requisite for leading it 
successfully. "It is when a man can 
do as he pleases," says Huxley, "that 
his troubles begin." They are not like- 
ly to be simplified if he takes the view 
of his independence that the newly 
liberated prisoner does, and rejoices 
in it as an end in itself. His taste 
is apt to suffer from the crudity in- 
herent in experimentation. His atti- 
tude toward his fellows still in the 
bonds of conformity, alternating as 
it does between compassion and con- 
tempt, makes him quite unaware of 
how unattractive the bravado that 
attracts him seems to the unemanci- 
pated. Speaking strictly, the cow- 
98 



THE INNER LIFE 

boy " shooting up " civilization is hardly 
an exaggerated analogue of the figure 
presented, at least to the conservative 
mind, by some of the activities asso- 
ciated with the assertion of personal 
independence. To the conservative, 
that is to say, the experienced, mind, 
it seems for instance naive to suppose 
that what is now so freely talked of 
as the single sexual standard will ulti- 
mately prove to be gold rather than 
silver. Meantime passing at parity, 
as economists warn us, the cheaper 
medium has the better chance. The 
life of the senses among us, in a word, 
will need to acquire standards in some 
degree constraining the desultory but 
constant impulses of the natural man 
before it can establish itself as a satis- 
factory substitute for the disciplines 
it aims at replacing. The self and the 
soul may be merely two conceptions of 
the same thing, but the one which is 
99 



STANDARDS 

mainly kept in mind distinguishes 
much conduct from that derived from 
dwelling on the other. 

The pride that Meredith notes as 
distinctively Pagan resembles as little 
the modern egotistic egoism that he 
flayed as it did the Christian humility 
that succeeded it as an ideal. And 
one of the two is essential to the inner 
life. Either will do; but without the 
pride whose self-respect scorns ego- 
tism or the humility whose spiritual 
refinement shrinks from it, the inner 
life is a desert. And the vitality of the 
present time seems independent of 
both. I have been assuming all along, 
I find, that abstractly at least the 
value of the inner life is axiomatically 
apparent to every thoughtful intelli- 
gence — however little it may conduce 
to the grosser forms of "service." 
Intelligence has never been more wide- 
spread nor more thoughtful. And one 
ioo 



THE INNER LIFE 

would expect it to associate the inner 
life with that ideal of personality 
which it entertains, even though appar- 
ently unaware of its failure as mere 
individuality to attain it. But really 
when one considers the aggressive self- 
assertion, the love of publicity, the 
feeling for instance that the truth 
should be spoken at all times even in 
advance of determining what it is, 
the frank and loyal exposure of one's 
whole personal bag of tricks — to take 
the most practical view of the proceed- 
ing — that at present flourish as vir- 
tues, one can hardly fail to perceive 
that the current ideal of personality 
is as defective as its realization is 
illusory. 

Nothing, for example, is more char- 
acteristic of the inner life than the 
sentiment of awe, which has prac- 
tically disappeared in the "clear-eyed 
and fearless " view of the universe that 

IOI 



STANDARDS 

is now quite generally taken. The 
starry heavens and the moral law no 
longer arouse the feeling they did in the 
breast of Kant. The imagination is no 
longer nourished by reflection on what 
speculation has vainly tried to solve. 
Only the sensible fragment of the vast 
pattern of the universal scheme oc- 
cupies the mind of a time intensely 
preoccupied by what it perceives. 
Outside the range of its perceptions 
it disports itself in all the relaxation 
of irresponsibility. Hence its deifica- 
tion of Poe and Whitman — the in- 
congruous constellation it has set in 
the firmament of our letters as the Cas- 
tor and Pollux of a heaven else a milky 
way of negligible nebulae. " My whole 
nature," said Poe, "utterly revolts 
at the idea that there is any being in 
the Universe superior to myself/' And 
we know who it was that good old 
Walt celebrated, even when he doesn't 

102 



THE INNER LIFE 

candidly say so but extends his theme 
without essentially varying it to in- 
clude his fellow men merely as his 
fellow men. Since egotism, thus, is 
the sole nexus between such other- 
wise temperamentally opposite types 
as the fastidious and the swaggering 
artist, it is probably what endears 
them both to a generation to which 
egotism is so congenial and awe so 
antipathetic as to lead it to exteriorize 
even its sentiments into sensations. 

In this process ethics as well as 
the personal morality to which I have 
referred suffers modification. Even if 
it may be looked at as the science of 
getting the most out of life there are 
distinctions between means to the 
end in view. The sensuous ideal of 
repletion is perhaps easiest to realize, 
though the effort to leave one's life 
a sucked orange at its close is doubtless 
more or less exhausting. "Well," ob- 
103 



STANDARDS 

served an American of genius on his 
death-bed some years ago, "I can say 
this: IVe never denied myself any- 
thing." "What you mean is," com- 
fortingly replied a candid compatriot 
of equal but more analytic genius, 
"that what you've had, you've had in 
excess." A bystander, without genius 
but merely better acquainted with the 
standards imposed by the inner life, 
might have reflected that the busi- 
ness of getting through life creditably, 
though involving far more effort, reaps 
pari passu far more reward than th>e 
success either claimed by the one or 
suggested by the other of these Epicu- 
reans, beside whom, too, those of the 
present day would seem amateurs in 
hedonism. 

Morality, however, is in greater or 

less degree a matter of the mores from 

which it derives, and, as Schiller, who 

did not foresee our eager and experi- 

104 



THE INNER LIFE 

mental age, says of mankind in general, 
"custom is its nurse." The springs 
of the present moment, which exteri- 
orizes everything, are to be found more 
certainly in its attitude to the more 
fundamental matter of religion. The 
churches are no doubt fully alive to 
what confronts them in the militant 
and anarchic atheism that considers 
their agencies — of which it is grossly 
ignorant and which probably continue 
to administer the bulk of the world's 
beneficence — as outworn as their 
formal confessions. A theologically de- 
tached observer should perhaps con- 
fine himself to remarking that in any 
case they appear to have their work 
cut out for them. But remembering 
Arnold's characterization of religion 
as the most lovable of things, one 
can but reflect that it would be salu- 
tary to treat this attractive quality 
of lovableness a little less summarily 
105 



STANDARDS 

than is sometimes done, and insist a 
little more pointedly on the truth that 
"service" is not a complete substitute 
for religion. Both Deuteronomy and 
the Gospel, dividing love into love of 
God and love of one's neighbor, assign 
the primacy to the former — in their 
own view we may be sure not conven- 
tionally but experientially. The re- 
versal of this relation has very definite 
results, as we see in the case of France. 
France is such a splendid figure at the 
present time that the enthusiasm for 
her has reached the degree of engoue- 
ment — an engouement that delights 
the soul of her earlier friends. Every- 
body can see it now. What she is 
and what she stands for shine over an 
area as wide as the world. At the 
same time one too long familiar with 
her conduct in crises to be surprised 
by her bearing now, may be per- 
mitted to recall his impression long 
1 06 



THE INNER LIFE 

ago recorded of routine France — 
namely, that to her reversal of the 
order of the two commandments on 
which hang all the law and the proph- 
ets, itself due to the high develop- 
ment of her social instinct, is due her 
ideal of social rather than personal 
morality, and the predominance in 
its following of the mind and heart 
over the soul. To this, nevertheless, 
the history of the "eldest daughter of 
the Church" presents a host of shin- 
ing exceptions, and plainly to the 
religion that has been so strong a 
formative influence even of Voltairian 
France, to Catholicism with its sense 
of social unity, is largely to be ascribed 
the even step which in France the 
heart has kept with the mind. 

Our history is too different to jus- 
tify the current disposition to take 
over her ideals en bloc — including 
her emancipation from the despotism 
107 



STANDARDS 

of the individual conscience, which 
certainly has its drawbacks, and her 
development of the life of the senses, 
out of which, as I have intimated, she 
has long made a very different thing 
from that which has thus far rewarded 
our own efforts in this direction. Our 
ideality in the field of the conscience 
is now experiencing the modification 
natural to expect of an individualism 
so ingrained as to tinge even our 
socialism with the color of anarchy. 
Long accustomed to hear that the 
kingdom of heaven is within one, it 
is not unnatural that the decline of 
formal religion among us and the 
invasion of the inner life by egotism 
should accord with a feeling that there, 
also, are to be found " whatever gods 
there be," in the words made less pop- 
ular by Swinburne than by Henley's 
paean — unlike Wordsworth's Nun, 
sonorous in self-adoration. The idea 
1 08 



THE INNER LIFE 

is an advance on Comte's doctrine of 
Humanity, though worked out with 
considerably less thoroughness. And 
conceiving of God as simply some ideal 
of our own, the human mind being 
assumed to be the highest creative 
agency known in nature, is a shorter 
and easier way of dealing with the 
subject than Joubert's method of know- 
ing God by ceasing to try to define 
Him. It makes a great difference 
practically, however, in the life of 
society as well as in the life of the 
individual whether God is conceived 
as the "Eternal Not Ourselves" or as 
the "Eternal Ourselves." In the lat- 
ter case, even in an age of egotism, it is 
easy for any one with a gift of intro- 
spection to see how in strict logic he 
may now and then become the very 
devil — in the letters and art, for 
example, which reflect the individual 
and communal life aforesaid. The in- 
109 



STANDARDS 

ner life must at any rate be less and 
less effectively celebrated by letters 
and art in the degree of its consecra- 
tion to the "Eternal Ourselves ,, within 
us, and perhaps its disappearance alto- 
gether would be involved in the sur- 
vival of the sense of humor. 



no 



VI 

"MODERN ART" 

NO general feature of the time, 
perhaps, more markedly illus- 
trates the main characteristics hitherto 
noted than the latest phase of modern 
art, the representative character of 
which accordingly has an interest in- 
dependent of its intrinsic claims. It 
has in these latest days so monopolized 
the more comprehensive title that 
when "modern art" is referred to it 
is generally understood that its latest 
phase is meant. The "evolution" of 
painting since Monet, for example, 
sculpture since Rodin, the art that 
seems to the uninitiate extravagance 
and eccentricity — art sans taste, in 
fact, and, what is still more strik- 
ing, sans virtuosity. This art leans 
in 



STANDARDS 

rather heavily on metaphysics, which 
at last seems to have invaded the pro- 
fessional art arcanum — as to which 
one may feel less chagrin than sur- 
prise that it had not done so before. 
It is in consequence extremely theoretic 
and in theory lays great stress on per- 
sonality. But, though it is plainly 
tremendously individual, owing to the 
confusion I have already spoken of, 
whereby individuality is mistaken for 
this very different quality, it is led 
into the error of justifying its extrav- 
agances by its sincerity — regarding 
them, that is to say, as personal ex- 
pression instead of wilful eccentricity. 
How otherwise than by this confusion 
account for its combination of sincerity 
and an extravagance so extreme as to 
appear mystification ? Given its sin- 
cerity why is it that so many concrete 
examples of theoretic personality are 
so destitute of the distinction that, 

112 



"MODERN ART" 

precisely, is the sign manual of per- 
sonality and are instead, as Henry 
James might say, so damnably com- 
monplace ? For I take it nothing is 
more commonplace than extravagance 
without distinction. If in a word 
you are absolutely sincere and what 
you show — to anything but the mi- 
croscope — is some manifestation of 
"group consciousness" rather than an 
idiosyncratic expression, you are prob- 
ably mistaken about your personality 
— at least in the higher reaches where 
it becomes perceptible to others. One 
understands what Mr. Dougherty 
means by "academic." Extravagance 
has no standards, of course, as both 
terms of the word itself recognize. 
But sincerity, being a positive quality, 
has. And to deny sincerity to the 
modern movement is to evince a dis- 
position which in itself tends to ex- 
plain it as a movement and which 
113 



STANDARDS 

illustrates the trades-union spirit in- 
stinctive in all fields, not only of art 
and letters but of life, wherein men 
have reached the formulae of their me- 
tier only after a prolonged and often 
painful apprenticeship. Mr. Clive 
Bell, portions of whose book entitled 
"Art" might give a salutary jolt to 
some of our conservatives, draws a 
touching picture of young painters he 
has seen in Paris "penniless, half-fed, 
unwarmed, ill-clothed, their women and 
children in no better case, working all 
day in feverish ecstasy at unsalable 
pictures." One feels that they were 
young, and learns with more surprise 
that "they were superbly religious." 
"Superbly religious" is, as we now say, 
"a new one." But we must be on our 
guard against Mr. Clive Bell, who adds 
succinctly, "All artists are religious," 
and who is so far from conceiving re- 
ligion as "morality touched with emo- 
114 



"MODERN ART" 

tion" as apparently to believe it emo- 
tion untouched with morality, or with 
anything indeed save the desire to 
manifest itself. However, we may cer- 
tainly credit his testimony to the sin- 
cerity of his young friends. No doubt 
the movement has its share of charla- 
tanism. Nothing so theoretic as to 
sophisticate its practice can avoid do- 
ing so. Besides as Napoleon observed: 
" Where will you not find charlatan- 
ism?" 

But it is fatuous to diagnose as 
charlatanism what irritates you be- 
cause you have first irritated it, and 
what excites such wide-spread enthusi- 
asm. To see in it on the other hand 
a spirit too protestant in its origin to 
promise positiveness in its develop- 
ment, and under illusions as to the 
constructiveness of its character, is to 
take a more rational as well as more re- 
ceptive attitude — is, in effect, merely 
115 



STANDARDS 

to confess an inability to see it other- 
wise and endeavor to explain the rea- 
sons for one's incapacity. One may, 
however, remember the tendency of 
fanaticism, which by definition has 
sincerity to spare, to accrete a fringe 
of imposture, and perceive in the 
mysticism associated with the new 
movement at least a mild menace of 
the mystification to which the esoteric 
is always exposed, and from which it 
is only to be saved by the interposition 
now and then of exoteric standards. 
My only point is that the new art, 
however provided with ideas, has not 
yet standardized them sufficiently to 
make them appear to others as other 
than notions, that it is held back from 
doing so by its hostility to standards in 
themselves in its pursuit of freedom, 
and that it would be a good thing all 
around if it should get some standards 
of its own, instead of "thrilling" the 
116 



"MODERN ART" 

observer by flouting the conventional. 
It could do this without subscribing 
to Mr. Cox's dictum that there is no 
progress in art, which to any one who 
conceives art as an expression of life 
can only be true if there is no progress 
in life — a tenable hypothesis surely 
but perhaps not widely enough held 
to repay argument. It would, at all 
events, in this way further what it 
conceives to be progress by minimizing 
the retarding friction of reaction which 
so inveterately dogs the steps of extrav- 
agance. A young American painter 
in Paris ardently enamored of the 
new movement remarked to me that 
only about three per cent of it was 
sound but that this was enough to 
justify it. Still, remembering how 
much mass counts in matters of this 
kind one may say that his percentage 
will have to be increased if the move- 
ment is not to exemplify anew the 
117 



STANDARDS 

eternal seesaw between what is called 
"going too far" and not going at all. 
There has been, we must admit, a 
good deal of the latter, and since it 
seems to be the former's turn, it is 
perhaps less quixotic to hope its pres- 
ent irresponsible individualism will 
not continue to leave progress wholly 
to chance, than to expect any dis- 
turbance of the stasis of routine prac- 
tice that has conventionalized the 
vitality out of its own standards. 

Meantime in spite of its theory it is 
a condition with which the latest art 
confronts us. What it says of itself 
impresses us less than how it looks. 
Its positive side is as yet so dominated 
by its polemic spirit as to make it 
doubtful if it be not after all less a 
stage than a "sport" in art evolution. 
Its advocates assert its analogy with 
the men of 1830. The fundamental 
contrast appears in a single example. 
118 



"MODERN ART" 

Delacroix spent years copying in the 
Louvre. Some of the energumens of 
the present wish to burn the museums. 
All convinced modernists maintain 
that, splendid as is the drawing of 
some of the old masters, beautiful as 
is the rendering of Velasquez and so 
on, art is still in its infancy because 
its potentialities have just begun to be 
perceived. A familiar illustration cited 
by them is that of the aeroplane, which 
betrays precisely the confusion of art 
with science that formally they deplore. 
And in effect the contribution to the 
development of art of the movement 
preceding their own must be viewed, 
although certainly not belittled, as 
mainly a technical contribution. No 
one can fail to acknowledge the tech- 
nical change that owing to an influ- 
ence beginning with Manet and Monet 
has keyed up current exhibitions every- 
where, including the most academic of 
119 



STANDARDS 

our own. In consequence of it what 
first strikes one now in current ex- 
hibitions is the subordination of sub- 
stance to surface^ The substitution of 
absolute for relative values by Manet, 
the addition of sunlight unenforced 
by shadow together with the use of 
broken color by Monet, comprise a 
contribution constituting an authentic 
and standardized advance. The art- 
ist has certainly developed a new 
expertness in seeing things in color 
and in seeing color in things, coin- 
cidently with the discovery that more 
vibrant and brilliant solidity could be 
achieved by combining the elements of 
the spectrum in the eye rather than on 
the palette. At a certain distance in 
this way an effect could be obtained 
surpassing in pure quality any effect 
attainable by blended unification at 
any distance however slight. Paint- 
ing bound into its own handbook a 
1 20 



"MODERN ART" 

leaf from the practice of the master 
mosaicists and gleams from Ravenna 
glowed anew on modern canvases. 

Thereupon ensued the epoch of ex- 
aggeration and fantasticality. Seeing 
mainly the novelty in the work of its 
immediate predecessors, and appar- 
ently not recognizing in their color 
discovery essentially an adaptation of 
an old principle inevitable in an old 
practice, it set about the business of 
being novel itself by main strength. 
In the way of exaggeration we have 
for example the sacrifice to carrying 
power of what used to be called the 
"handsome canvas" — a sacrifice that 
can be minimized only if the easel 
picture is to go, which is a practical 
absurdity. Meanwhile what is gained 
if the illusion of relief and the effect 
of brilliancy are heightened by the 
blending of distance so that a canvas 
only shows at thirty feet a quality it 

121 



STANDARDS 

loses at ten, besides losing also every- 
thing that constitutes it a " handsome 
canvas"? And except in an exhibition 
it is at ten that it is seen. Of course 
it is interesting to see it gain in "vi- 
tality" as one moves away from it. 
But this interest is a scientific and not 
an aesthetic one. Nor is vitality every- 
thing. There are some things that 
demand a delicacy of technic incon- 
sistent with it. 

"Light feet, dark violet eyes and parted hair, 
Soft dimpled hands, white neck and creamy 
breast" 

deserve to be seen near to, where alone 
their delicacy can be appreciated and 
where accordingly they should not 
appear under the aspect of 

Lead feet, bold, blue-black eyes and violet hair, 
Hard knotty hands, green neck and chalky 
breast, 

however they may regain their mere 
identity and even acquire an added 

122 



"MODERN ART" 

vitality at a distance. The note of 
vitality is capable of being forced, and 
when it is forced systematically the 
sense of beauty in both artist and 
beholder must suffer some attrition 
in the long run. Certain elements of 
this sense, such as its feeling for the 
exquisite and the elegant, are already 
extinct in "modern art," in none of 
whose manifestations is there any trace 
of the quality that makes a master- 
piece of every canvas of a painter like, 
for example, Charles Bargue. And in- 
deed the convinced modernist is quite 
logical in conceiving beauty as once 
conceived not his affair at all. Other- 
wise his canvases would at his chosen 
distance evince a different kind of 
elementary taste from that which they 
sometimes exhibit — mass, for example, 
look less messy and detail have more 
distinction. The vitality of an en- 
semble of properties without any par- 
123 



STANDARDS 

ticular quality, to which he so often 
treats us must be of a more or less 
galvanic order. 

In the way of fantasticality we have 
also technical experimentation in search 
of novelty a outrance — post-impres- 
sionism, futurism, cubism. But here 
the standardless emotionalism of the 
time is more universal, more funda- 
mental, and more evident than in its 
mere exaggeration, and here we enter 
the penetralia of a metaphysical cul- 
tus which ascribes an esoteric quality 
to the artist as such. Here when he 
comes to exteriorize the emotion his 
possession of, or rather by, which is 
plainly not illusory since it is so ob- 
viously in large part his explanation, 
his logic is less conspicuous than it 
is when he is engaged in sacrificing 
insipid beauty to the Moloch of vital- 
ity. For instance, Mr. Clive Bell, 
again, asserts quite truly that "a prac- 
124 



"MODERN ART" 

tical person goes into a room where 
there are chairs, tables, sofas, a hearth- 
rug, and a mantelpiece and takes note 
of each of these things intellectually, ,, 
whereas "the artist qua artist" is 
concerned with them "only as a means 
to a particular kind of emotion." 
Why, then, has Vermeer ceased to 
thrill the "modern" ? Because, appar- 
ently, he expresses his emotion by the 
representation that will communicate 
it. At least Mr. Clive Bell continues 
a little later that "manifestation is as 
different from 'expression' as Mon- 
mouth is from Macedon." The dis- 
tinction confirms our worst suspicions 
as to much of the concrete art which 
Mr. Clive Bell celebrates, and of which 
many of the manifestations seem so 
manifestly expressionless. The theory 
is a labor-saving one but not otherwise 
attractive, because even expression in 
art needs to be supplemented by com- 
125 



STANDARDS 

munication if it is to be appreciated 
at all. "Every expressor is related 
solely to himself " announces one of 
the exhibitors in the catalogue derai- 
sonne of a recent modern show. As 
to which the observer may reflect 
with Mr. Santayana that "solipsism 
in another is absurd." The artist 
cannot be permitted to function for 
himself alone. Such selfishness would 
in ordinary eyes compromise even his 
religious character. And if he is to 
be appreciated he must communicate. 
Otherwise his emotional manifestation 
must mystify us. If he has not, in 
popular parlance, "got it over," how 
do we know he has got it out ? He 
has perhaps had his catharsis, but in 
secret. Besides we want ours. Ours, 
indeed, was the one Aristotle had in 
mind. 

At bottom this explains the puzzled 
resentment of the beholder, who qua 
126 



"MODERN ART" 

beholder is not religious in any sense. 
He feels cheated of his dues, and 
manifests emotion too, though emo- 
tion of the expressionable kind, 
clearly his only way of getting even 
with the artist. And how is the artist 
to communicate save through appear- 
ances? We know of course that the 
form of an egg is not really its shell, 
but the modern artist had better for- 
get metaphysics and think it is if we 
are to share the emotion its "pure 
form ,, produces in him. Speculation 
aside — since it is already in shreds — 
what one practically notes in much 
"modern art," objectively considered, 
is that representation instead of being 
artistic rather than literal is approxi- 
mate rather than close, attesting in- 
capacity to render rather than ability 
to generalize. The same glance re- 
veals the target and records the miss. 
Subjectively we must take the artist's 
127 



STANDARDS 

word for his success. We need his 
own private sources of information to 
see in his treatment of his theme the 
expression or manifestation of his per- 
sonality — to recur to the illusion of 
personality with which he clothes his 
sense of himself as an individual. We 
can only see that what he maintains 
he has first analyzed and then alem- 
bicated, and that what he seeks be- 
cause it is elusive and abstract, has 
proved elusive and is certainly not 
concrete. What he has failed to keep 
out is as little personal as what he 
has succeeded in putting in. He may 
be an altogether different kind of 
man from what we should naturally 
expect, and we ought perhaps to be 
more careful than we sometimes are 
to avoid doing him the injustice he 
is at no pains to forefend. He may, 
so far as we can see, have a sensitive 
soul and an intelligent mind enriched 
128 



"MODERN ART" 

with experience and even erudition. 
But it is idle to fancy we could infer 
anything so concrete from an algebraic 
alembication of the elusive and the 
abstract, in the absence of standards 
with which he has not only not fur- 
nished us but to the mere notion of 
which he is inveterately opposed. 

At all events his sincerity has not 
been able to protect him against mis- 
taking self-assertion for independence 
and it is easy to see in many of his 
"manifestations" the aggressiveness 
characteristic of attenuated personal- 
ity. The chief figures in this distinctly 
notional movement have certainly 
characters as clearly concentrated as 
they are obviously limited. But in the 
work of the mass of their followers 
derivation is the first — and last — 
thing noticeable, when indeed the work 
rises out of a mere mechanical reflec- 
tion of the notionality of the movement 
129 



STANDARDS 

considered as a whole. Never was a 
convention so quickly established as 
this convention of the unconventional. 
Never, for this reason, has a major 
convention been so quickly productive 
of a multitude of minor ones wherein 
the personal force of independence 
has been so speedily paralyzed by the 
poison of irresponsibility. The per- 
sonal force moreover that operates at 
ease on the plane and in the region 
delimited by standards insensibly es- 
tablished, must naturally be constrict- 
ed and enfeebled when driven into the 
enclosure of a movement largely tech- 
nical and chiefly characterized by 
exaggeration and fantasticality. The 
work of the real personalities of current 
art, those who feel a new sentiment 
in nature, such as that of the particu- 
lar place, those who feel new aspects 
of nature, as those disclosed by more 
attentive consideration of light and 
130 



"MODERN ART" 

color, those in other words whose work 
is the interpretation of new discoveries 
in their inexhaustible material, who, 
as Carriere declared, "love discovery 
and detest invention," inevitably sub- 
scribe to recognized standards in qual- 
ity of aim and effort. And in doing 
so they undoubtedly contrast rather 
than accord with the great mass of 
a movement whose technical experi- 
mentation is no more to be explained 
than it is to be justified by employing 
the terms of metaphysical notionality 
to characterize the work of a rather 
hastily assumed artistic temperament. 
Pictures for the blind, music for the 
deaf, if they have the intellectual 
interest claimed for them, have it in 
virtue of a scientific rather than an 
artistic appeal, and naturally there- 
fore escape slavery to such standards 
as are here in question. And of course 
science negates personality. The curi- 
131 



STANDARDS 

osity stimulated and satisfied by the 
average collection of "modern art" 
may be a far livelier feeling than that 
aroused by an exhibition of academic 
inanities but it is not an artistic feeling. 
It is aroused by an inspection of tech- 
nic rather than substance and must 
content itself with less personal feel- 
ing than can be observed in the most 
conventional academic array whose 
technic, at all events, has not distracted 
the artist however little it may divert 
the spectator. Of course I am not 
speaking of beautiful technic, which 
has an abundant if inferior artistic in- 
terest, but of the particular technic 
of much "modern art" which is at 
once its characterizing and, from the 
standpoint of beauty, its most repel- 
lent feature. 

Beauty indeed is one of the few 
abstractions it views as necessarily 
conventional, but its theory here does 
132 



"MODERN ART" 

not save it from the caricature in- 
herent in its extravagance of exaggera- 
tion and fantasticality. Caricature is, 
of course, not simply queerness. It is 
the exaggeration, as art is the empha- 
sis, of the essential. But what is mere 
accent to the temperamentally crude, 
however esoterically expert, is exag- 
geration to the cultivated. Obviously, 
therefore, the only path to any con- 
sensus whereby "modern" may suc- 
ceed established art as a later phase of 
orderly evolution — as, for example, 
romanticism did classicism and natu- 
ralism romanticism — lies through the 
cultivation of the crude. What we 
are now rather delightedly witnessing, 
however, is rather the contamination 
of the cultivated, exhibited in individ- 
ual eccentricities which find even their 
own bond of union in a common hos- 
tility to the standardizing influence 
of taste. The fact that these eccen- 
i33 



STANDARDS 

tricities tend rapidly through imita- 
tion to establish their own several 
conventions is to be explained by con- 
tagion — which conserves its char- 
acter whatever the personal force of 
the individuals it attacks. It loses 
to be sure its intensity in spreading; 
the tendency of the unconventional 
to establish conventions of its own 
is as I said marked. Thereupon it 
is left with those conventions on 
its hands, conventions ineffaceably 
stamped with the fundamental eccen- 
tricity of their origin, however they 
may come to pass as current coin. 
This reasoning is clearly less applica- 
ble to the constructive than to the 
purely revolutionary element in mod- 
ern art. The difficulty is that the con- 
structive element is so largely a matter 
of technic and of technic so largely 
unalleviated by taste. 



i34 



VII 

THE CAUSE OF ART AND LETTERS 

ARE art and letters to be senti- 
* mentalized out of their estab- 
lished standards by the comprehen- 
sive and militant democratic movement 
of our time ? is the question in which 
our whole discussion ends. Still more 
succinctly, are they to be produced 
by and for the crude or the cultivated ? 
Hitherto — miracles of genius ex- 
cepted, as an incalculable element in 
any discussion — they have been pro- 
duced by special and arduous training, 
for the appreciation of general and 
hardly less arduously attained cul- 
ture — the rest of the interested public 
taking its cue from these as at least 
useful guides and not, as at present, 

i35 



STANDARDS 

instinctively suspicious of them as 
vitiated by professionalism. The ex- 
pert it is true in all departments of 
effort has his own personal equation 
for which it is always prudent to make 
due allowance. But the field of art 
and letters is after all a circumscribed 
one in the world of mankind's activities, 
and its proper cultivation has reached 
a pitch of intensiveness that demands 
more knowledge and training than mere 
inkling and energy have at their com- 
mand. The artist who with Mr. Clive 
Bell conceives art as religion easily 
brings himself to avoid difficulties pain- 
ful to surmount, and naturally deems 
it a business of the soul. Like the 
water of life in the Apocalypse it is 
in his view to be taken freely and by 
all comers. Multitudes have certainly 
come, such numbers indeed as to put 
the principle of natural selection quite 
out of commission and make one look 
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back wistfully to the old disciplined 
novitiate as a preparation for, at least, 
the priesthood of the cult. 

Paul Baudry was not a great artist 
in the sense of being an artist of orig- 
inal genius. But consider his career 
and accomplishment as an example 
of what intelligent instead of senti- 
mental democracy can produce. Mr. 
Low sketches it for us in his Scammon 
Lectures. He was the son of a sabot 
maker in a small provincial town. In- 
stead of considering exclusively its own 
material needs the commune, having 
discovered intimations of genuine tal- 
ent in him, taxed itself to send him to 
Paris. Hard work won him the prix 
de Rome. Years of study at the Villa 
Medici, and the culture he as inevi- 
tably as unconsciously absorbed in the 
Roman atmosphere of elevated aes- 
thetic achievement, resulted in his dec- 
oration of the Nouvel Opera, a work 
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STANDARDS 

which, whatever its faults or shortcom- 
ings, simply pinnacles him as one of the 
salient figures in painting of the nine- 
teenth century. The "expressor re- 
lated solely to himself" may justifiably 
interest us less. Supposing this per- 
son to have condescendingly entered so 
banal a structure as Garnier's master- 
piece he may quite legitimately, I 
think, note the weakness of Baudry's 
personal expression, the derivative 
character of his beautiful drawing and 
skilful composition, his attenuation 
of the Raphaelesque in his exclusive 
continuance of its tradition. But in 
the way of accomplishment, of per- 
petuating the spirit of the monumental 
and the beautiful, what is in compari- 
son his own eager but wanton experi- 
mentation in an august field, entered 
without credentials of specific equip- 
ment or general culture ? The con- 
trast is striking but is merely typical 
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of that necessarily constant between 
disciplined and so-called free art. 

But conceding the artist's possession 
of his craft and the pitch of clever- 
ness that our writers have achieved, 
the weakness of those young friends of 
Mr. Clive Bell, the weakness in fact 
of the practitioner in general in the 
field of art and letters at the present 
time, is that not as an artist nor as a 
writer but as a man he does not know 
enough. The fact may be noted with- 
out invidiousness, since it only places 
him in the same category in which 
Arnold set Byron and Wordsworth — 
the two figures in English literature 
that after Shakespeare and Milton 
he deemed the most majestic. But 
it is not necessary to argue from august 
examples the value of knowledge to the 
criticism of life on a stately scale, in 
order to appreciate the importance to 
any specific work of intelligence of its 
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STANDARDS 

intellectual connotation. It is indeed 
of primary importance that this too 
should be important in order to secure 
the importance of the work itself. If 
the work is to appeal to any observer 
or reader who really counts, it must 
stimulate associations of real value 
and not merely produce a reaction of 
the senses. Therefore the painter or 
the poet must himself have these 
associations. Otherwise how evoke 
them in others ? It is a commonplace 
that no one can know anything well 
without knowing other things too. In 
point of fact the first thing we wish to 
know, to feel, to see in a work of art 
is just this: What and how much 
does the mind of the artist contain ? 
What is its other furniture besides 
merely the special aptitude and equip- 
ment required for the production of 
this particular thing, of which this par- 
ticular thing is but the sample ? It is 
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not the foot that interests us but 
Hercules. We are brought around 
finally, I think, to make the same de- 
mand of culture in the case of the art- 
ist, which I began by suggesting in 
the case of his public. To require 
the artist to know more is, however, 
to exact something quite out of keep- 
ing with the spirit of the time. 

For example, there is Mr. Eastman's 
delightful and notable book, "Enjoy- 
ment of Poetry,' ' one of the most con- 
sidered contributions that have been 
made to American criticism. Mr. 
Eastman is a poet himself. And more 
even than in poetry he is interested in 
increasing the stock of human happi- 
ness. Naturally he thinks of poetry as 
an ally. And a genuine and valuable 
ally he makes it out to be. It would 
be hard to find elsewhere more pene- 
trating observations upon the art of 
poetry, all quite new as well as evi- 
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STANDARDS 

dently long pondered and fitting beau- 
tifully together in demonstration of his 
interesting thesis. But, in dwelling on 
its idiosyncratic quality, which is of 
course quite independent of knowledge, 
he certainly inclines to divorce the 
practice of poetry from the knowledge 
with which if it is important it is in- 
fallibly associated. He says archly: 
"To attribute to it the origin of great 
poetry, is paying too high a compli- 
ment even to so valuable a thing as 
ignorance " — as if he knew anything 
about ignorance ! But he adds that 
"there is a certain antithesis between 
poetry and knowledge" and that 
"poetry exists either before that is 
acquired or after it is surmounted." 
Naturally he can demonstrate what 
poetry is as distinguished from prose, 
by Whitman as well as by Words- 
worth. And thinking thus of its dis- 
tinctive character rather than of its 
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comparative rank, ignoring thus one 
of the standards which measure its 
value — since it would be idle to main- 
tain that any poetry is superior to any 
prose, that of the savage, for instance, 
to the prose of Burke — he comes 
winningly, but not quite convincingly, 
to suggest to all of us who wish to 
enjoy poetry to make our own. " Bet- 
ter even than understanding poetry 
as a way to learn the enjoyment of 
it," he concludes finely, " — and that 
without alienation from the better 
poem of one's own existence — is to 
create it for one's self." Mr. Eastman 
speaks, as the French say, bien a son 
aise. The rest of us may justifiably 
feel some self-distrust, and continue 
to get our enjoyment out of the born 
poets, more particularly those possessed 
of knowledge as well as faculty. Pos- 
sunt quia posse videntur implies in this 
case too hopeful a view. But there 
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STANDARDS 

is no doubt whatever that at the 
present time enjoyment of poetry is 
being largely extracted from its pro- 
duction. And so far as value is con- 
cerned the prodigious production of it 
that marks our epoch must be ad- 
mitted to contribute far less to the 
enjoyment of others than the poetry 
which preceded it and which, if strictly 
professional, was far more intimately 
associated with that general knowledge 
now so generally disesteemed. General 
knowledge, too, quite aside, it is curi- 
ous to note how much more lightly 
its special technic is taken in compari- 
son with music, for example. A gen- 
eration ago every young woman played 
the piano. Now she realizes the vanity 
'of expecting to do so well. A genera- 
tion hence, it may be, she will be con- 
vinced that poetry is a difficult art 
also. 

Of course, as I began by saying, the 
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public equally with the artist and writer 
has the cause of art and letters in its 
keeping. And so far as knowledge is 
an advantage in art and letters it is 
the business of the larger public — 
not to possess it, to expect which would 
not only be unreasonable but unneces- 
sary — but to respect it, as it is the 
business of the "remnant" to exact 
it. To advocate any peremptory agen- 
cies to this end would be as illusory as 
Mr. Howells shows it to be in his amus- 
ing story, "The Critical Bookstore." 
The philanthropist who sets up this 
establishment to combine censorship 
with commercialism apparently deals 
in fiction exclusively — where certainly 
the field for both commerce and cen- 
sure is so vast as perhaps to justify 
a monopoly of his benevolent efforts. 
His experiment proves multifariously 
unsatisfactory, and experiencing a to- 
tal change of heart he shuts up his 
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STANDARDS 

shop, and announces his conversion 
by expressing a repugnance to artificial 
selection which, even without his ex- 
perience, we can all share. But he ex- 
presses also a resignation to the proc- 
esses and results of natural selection 
in which it requires a very considerable 
amount of optimism to participate. 
"What is all the worthy family of 
asses to do," he exclaims, "if there are 
no thistles to feed them?" Is the 
case so desperate as that ? Is, in- 
deed, this family to be regarded as a 
constant quantity ? Why, at any rate, 
contribute to keep it so by pamper- 
ing it with its favorite food ? Why 
not, in a word, deplore the number of 
asses rather than the failure of the 
ihistle crop ? It is, no doubt, less a 
practical than a sentimental matter, 
but the more the cultivation of this- 
tles comes to be looked upon with 
disfavor, whatever the demand for 
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them, the more the taste for them is 
likely to diminish and even an asinine 
demand arise for different provender. 
No one considers morals a matter to 
be left to natural selection. Does the 
intellect need less help? The con- 
verted critical-bookstore keeper pro- 
ceeds to state his view of the Republic 
of Letters as "a vast, benevolent, gen- 
erous democracy where every one may 
have what one likes," and his concep- 
tion of literature as "the whole world, 
the expression of the gross, the fatu- 
ous, the foolish, as well as the expression 
and the pleasure of the wise, the fine, 
and the elect." But it is notoriously 
difficult to keep pace with the zeal of 
the convert, and one wonders if his 
ideal in this case is not fundamentally 
a humane rather than a literary one. 
How better express the distinction 
between mere printed matter and liter- 
ature than by saying the latter is just 
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STANDARDS 

this: "the expression and the pleasure 
of the wise, the fine, and the elect " ? 
And why not observe the distinction 
even while remembering the command- 
ing claims of human happiness ? Per- 
haps after all some other way may be 
found of satisfying these claims than 
by adulterating figs with thistles, or 
by encouraging the critical inspector to 
"pass" thistles as figs, especially bear- 
ing in mind the tendency — observed 
by Renan — which the thistles have 
to get the upper hand. Perhaps after 
all figs in plenty would become more 
popular in quarters gradually finding 
it as uncomfortable to be viewed de 
haul en has by the gentle heart as by 
the arrogant mind. 

At all events it is to have in mind 
some other cause than that of art and 
letters, to conceive of these as an abso- 
lutely unenclosed domain — the com- 
mon of civilization, so to say, whose 
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weedy aspects and worn places and 
rubbish heaps are as legitimate details 
as its cultivated area. Ought not ac- 
cess to this territory to be made more 
difficult, as difficult as possible ? At 
least let us have a gate — the strait 
gate whereby he who has some kind of 
credentials may enter in, and so far as 
possible win public opinion to approve 
the closing up of those other ways ac- 
cessible to the thief and the robber. 
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ? Not the 
authority of autocracy certainly; nor 
even that of criticism whose function, 
as I said, is the exposition of the prin- 
ciples that are the test of standards, 
so much as the standards themselves 
which arise insensibly in the mind of 
the cultivated public and spread in 
constantly widening circles. Man- 
kind, once more, is wiser than any 
man, and its correlative in the case 
of arts and letters is the public, whose 
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STANDARDS 

co-operation is quite as important 
as that of their professional represen- 
tatives. For it is always to be re- 
membered that the cause of letters, 
the cause of art, is not that of its 
practitioners — hardly that of its prac- 
tice — but of its constituting stand- 
ards. Just as the cause of mankind 
is not that of the men who compose 
it, which it is the weakness of purely 
material philanthropy to forget. The 
idea is not a vague one. And since 
I have ventured to speak of routine 
France as more sympathetic than de- 
vout, I may note that, so far from be- 
ing vague, it is an idea which is at the 
present time being illustrated not only 
splendidly, supremely, but with that 
precision which in the world of ideas 
is a French characteristic. We have 
before our eyes the demonstration of 
its definiteness by an entire people 
animated with the clear consciousness 
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that what counts for them, in this 
brief interlude of time between two 
eternities, is not the comfort or even 
the lives of any or all Frenchmen, 
but the perpetual renewal of the con- 
secrated oil that feeds the torch of 
France. 



151 



